SecureIoD: A Secure Data Collection and Storage Mechanism for Internet of Drones

Thanks to rapid advancements in microprocessors, battery technologies, and lightweight materials, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, have received signif-icant interest in the past few years. As drone-related commercial and civilian applications are flourishing, Internet-of-Drones (IoD) is moving into the fast lane and quickly becoming a highly anticipated network paradigm, where drones and Zone Service Providers (ZSPs) coordinate knowledge sharing in a reliable, accurate, and efficient way. However, for the sake of both strategic and financial value to business and mission critical applications, it is of vital importance to address both data security and privacy preservation issues brought by drones' inherent resource constraints and wide-open wireless medium. In this paper, we propose a secure data collection and storage mechanism, also called SecureIoD, for the IoD environment. In SecureIoD, drones and ZSPs first mutually authenticate each other and establish a secure session key before sharing any sensitive data via an insecure wireless channel. Then, ZSPs pack the collected data into blocks and compete to add their blocks into the blockchain. We also propose a joint Proof-of- Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism to select the miner ZSP, where the more transactions are in the block, the easier a ZSP can solve the cryptographic puzzle. We present security verification and analysis to show that SecureIoD can resist various security attacks. Finally, we develop a real-world testbed, implement SecureIoD and existing SDDM and BACSIoD schemes, and carry out extensive simulation experiments for performance evaluation and analysis. Experimental results reveal that not only does SecureIoD have lower computation cost, energy consumption, miner selection time, and communication overhead, but also offer better security features and capabilities.