PDAC-SL: A PUF-enabled drone access control technique for smart logistics

The conventional logistics’ paradigm is being replaced with smarter ways of supply chain management to readily serve the customers with quick modes of delivery in affordable operational costs. The weak infrastructure in rural terrain and congested roads in urban cities act as a big impediment in the successful accomplishment of last mile delivery down the lane across the complete chain of logistics. The traditional logistics has been evolved and improved in many respects, the last mile delivery is still plagued by security and privacy risks in logistics. The use of drones for package deliveries may offer promising gains in terms of efficiency. Nonetheless, drones undergo security and privacy risks besides physical threats for being deployed in public places communicating on open channels. Thus, more efforts are needed to secure the communication of inducted drones in delivery assignments. We propose a novel PUF-enabled drone access control mechanism PDAC-SL for smart logistics. By the careful employment of symmetric crypto-primitives, the contributed protocol not only supports low end devices but stands resistant to physical drone and other known threats besides preserving anonymity and untraceability features. The RoR model-based formal security analysis and performance analysis demonstrate distinct security properties and applicability of the PDAC-SL.