A Novel Lightweight Authentication Mechanism for UAVs based on SDDN architecture

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are versatile, used for tasks such as surveillance, mapping and delivery, offering cost-effective and efficient solutions in various industries. Hence, the rapid advancements of UAVs technologies increase their confrontation to substantial challenges like their constrained capacities: endurance, range, data process, etc. In addition, security and privacy of UAVs are a primary issue since attacks on UAV systems can cause loss of life and property. Ensuring drones authentication has become imperative to limit several kinds of attacks. UAVs networks management is also a challenging condition to ensure flexibility and scalability. Therefore, in this paper, we aim to ensure a secure UAV network by proposing a lightweight authentication mechanism based on Elliptic Curve Cryptographic (ECC) based on Software Defined Drone Network (SDDN). Through the proposed SDDN architecture, a secure efficient management of network resources is provided. Using this proposed authentication process, attacks such as Man-In- The-Middle, ID spoofing, replay, injection, modification, etc. are detected. To prove the effectiveness of our proposition, we validate it using two methods: A case study that illustrate the different attacks prevented and detected by our protocol. A formal security analysis using the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool in order to confirm the safety of the proposal.