Cost-Effective PUF and ECC-Based Authentication Protocol for Secure Internet of Drones Communication

Internet of Drones (IoD) plays a critical role in remote monitoring operations. It has been heavily deployed in applications such as traffic management, air traffic control, disaster and agricultural monitoring. In such operations, high volumes of sensitive and private data is collected and transmitted to the ground stations. The usage of unreliable and open wireless channels during the message exchange process exposes the IoD to a myriad of security threats. Therefore, numerous authentication protocols have been developed in the recent past to mitigate these threats. However, most of these protocols are still inadequate in the provision of robust security against typical IoD attacks. Because, they involve resource-intensive operations and make them unsuitable for an IoD environment. Therefore, we put forward a new authentication protocol which exhibits costeffective performance. To develop the new protocol for secure IoD communication, we leverage on biometrics, physically unclonable function and elliptic curve cryptography for the robust performance. Extensive formal security analysis using the Random Oracle Model (ROM) is showing that proposed protocol is provably secure. The informal security analysis is also performed which demonstrates its robustness against all the threat assumptions in the Canetti-Krawczyk (C-K) model. Specifically, it is found to offer conditional privacy, unlinkability, anonymity, mutual authentication, session key establishment and perfect key secrecy. Moreover, it is capable enough to mitigate numerous threats such as forgery, impersonation, stolen verifier, replay, physical capture, de-synchronization, known secret key and smart card loss attacks. The performance is cost-effective as evident from the comparative analysis showing that the proposed protocol incurs the lowest energy consumptions and computation overheads at relatively low communication costs compared to many other authentication schemes.