Securing the Skies: A Cutting-Edge Authenticated Key Establishment Protocol for the Internet of Drones

With the growing presence of drones in our skies, securing their operations and ensuring reliable communication has become more crucial than ever. These drones form interconnected networks known as the Internet of Drones (IoD) to facilitate real-time coordination, autonomous aerial surveillance, and special aerial tasks. However, the interaction between drones and ground stations occurs over unregulated and dynamic communication channels, introducing security vulnerabilities such as impersonation, Man-in-the-Middle (MitM), and forgery attacks. Implementing robust authentication protocols can serve as a promising solution to protect drone operations and communication, thereby ensuring the safety and security of our skies. In this article, we introduce a novel authentication and key establishment protocol that uniquely integrates level-triggered Physically Unclonable Function (PUF), BCH error-correcting code, and AES-GCM symmetric encryption, setting a new standard for secure and reliable communication between drones and ground stations. We demonstrate the robustness of our protocol through comprehensive security verification using the Scyther tool, coupled with formal validation within the Random Oracle Model (ROM). Through rigorous performance analysis, we demonstrate the superiority of our protocol over baseline protocols, achieving 64.37% greater efficiency in computation and 26.03% reduction in communication overheads. We also present a realistic implementation of our protocol using Pix32 v6 companion with Raspberry Pi as drone and laptop device as ground station server. The PUF has been implemented in Xilinx Arty A7-100T FPGA board. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work demonstrating the implementation of a complete authentication cycle in real-world IoD settings.