<scp>REHAS</scp>: Robust and Efficient Hyperelliptic Curve‐Based Authentication Scheme for Internet of Drones

ABSTRACT Internet of Drones (IoD) is one of the most beneficial and has many versatile applications like Surveillance and Security, Delivery and Logistics, Environmental Monitoring, Agriculture, and so forth. The IoD network is crucial for collecting sensitive data like geo‐coordinates, vehicle traffic data, and property details while surveying the various deployment locations in smart cities. The communication between users and drones can be compromised over insecure wireless channels by multiple attacks such as Man‐in‐the‐middle‐attack, Denial of Service, and so forth. Many schemes have already been propounded in the field of IoD. Still, many of them cannot address the resource constraints problem of drones, and existing protocols have higher computation and communication costs. Therefore, this paper has proposed a robust and efficient Hyper‐Elliptic Curve‐based authentication scheme (REHAS), which provides a session key for secure communication. Artificial Identities are generated using a hash function and random numbers. Fuzzy Extractor is used for user biometric authentication, which makes the smart device secure when lost. HECC is used with a smaller bit size of 80 bits rather than ECC of 160 bits. The security of the REHAS has been ensured using Scyther simulation. Furthermore, the resilience, safety, and robustness of REHAS are ensured by Informal security analysis. Lastly, a comparative study of the REHAS has been performed with other related Authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocols regarding communication cost, Computation cost, and security features, demonstrating that REHAS incurred less computation cost (6.7171 ms), communication overhead (1696 bits), and energy consumption (22.5 mJ) than other existing AKA schemes.