Bilinear Pairing and PUF Based Lightweight Authentication Protocol for IoD Environment

As the popularity growth of drones is witnessed in various fields, people start attaching importance to the Internet of Drones (IoD) paradigm. In the IoD, the regional aviation administration (i.e., Zone Service Providers (ZSPs)) regulates the usage of vast yet limited airspace and provides necessary services (i.e., supplemental data services) for various drone applications. In order to create a secure environment for communications, authentication and key agreement protocols have an important role to play in the IoD. A few conventional security protocols specifically designed for traditional communication networks cannot be directly exercised in the IoD environment because of their non-negligible computational overhead and the distinctive characteristics of IoD (i.e., insufficient resources of drones). In this paper, we propose a bilinear pairing and physical unclonable function based lightweight authentication protocol (hereafter referred to as liteCrypto) for the IoD environment. In liteCrypto, a drone and the ZSP mutually authenticate each other and establish a secure session key based on bilinear pairing and physical unclonable function before sharing any critical information over an insecure wireless channel. In terms of performance evaluation, we first implement liteCrypto in High-Level Protocol Specification Language (HLPSL) and verify its security performance in the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) environment, and then present a security analysis of liteCrypto. In addition, we develop a real-world testbed, implement liteCrypto and its two counterparts (i.e., ECCAuth and RAMP-IoD), conduct extensive experiments, and provide an in-depth performance analysis. Our performance evaluation shows that not only is liteCrypto a secure communication protocol, but also outperforms its counterparts in terms of computational overhead, energy consumption, as well as communication cost.