A Secure Cryptosystem for Secure Data Transmission in IoT-based UAV Networks

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a transformative technology that connects devices and objects embedded with sensors through the Internet. IoT-based UAV networks prove their better utilization in military operations, agriculture, smart cities, etc. Besides providing better coverage, the UAVs carry sensitive data in the resource-constrained environment during communication with the user entity, which makes them vulnerable to logical and physical attacks. Considering the challenges, we propose a secure cryptosystem for secure data transmission in IoT-based UAV Networks, which employs the hyperelliptic curve of genus greater than one, providing better performance in terms of computation, communication, and storage costs. The cryptosystem secures the user’s private key while transmitting sensitive information using a hyperelliptic curve discrete logarithmic problem (HCDLP). It achieves security features such as anonymity, untraceability, forward secrecy and others using a secure hash function, random number and separate timestamps to prevent physical and logical attacks, which are analysed using formal verification Scyther tool and informal method. The proposed cryptosystem performance is compared with benchmark schemes, and the result shows lower computation, communication and storage costs as $10.33 \mathrm{~ms}, 1456$ bits and 1280 bits, respectively, with no trade-off between security and performance.