Key-Based Authentication Scheme for eVTOL Drones Using Chebyshev Chaotic Maps

The development of electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) drones signifies a substantial advancement in urban air mobility, ready to transform transportation models in densely populated regions. These advanced drones, distinguished by their capacity to function in limited spaces and their minimized environmental impact, are set to transform individual, shipping, emergency services, and public safety activities. Nonetheless, like any transformational technology, the implementation of eVTOL systems presents many challenges, especially in the realm of cybersecurity. Adding many devices and entities to an eVTOL network increases the risk of privacy and security attacks. This paper proposes a key-based authentication scheme that utilizes Chebyshev polynomials as chaotic maps, hash functions, and the AES-256 encryption technique. The network members can securely generate all encryption keys without sharing secret data, which solves one of the main problems of the symmetric encryption scheme in the authentication service. In addition, compared with other schemes that depend on current keys to generate future keys, this proposed scheme can work in parallel and generate all the required keys for the same eVTOL drone at the same time. The security and privacy analysis shows that this scheme achieves the required features identified in the design goals. The results showed that this scheme has less computation and communication overhead when compared to other existing schemes.