An anonymous authentication and key agreement protocol with session-preserving cross-domain handover using PUF and biometrics

Anonymous authentication and key agreement (AKE) protocols underpin the security of cyber-physical systems, but existing schemes face a recurring tension: protocols that achieve strong device attestation through Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF) or biometric binding rarely support efficient cross-domain handover, while protocols that do support handover typically renegotiate the entire session key, breaking end-to-end secure sessions and inflating bandwidth at the most resource-constrained end. This paper proposes B-PUF A 2 K, a three-party anonymous AKE protocol whose principal contribution is a session-preserving cross-domain handover mechanism: the serving authentication server issues an authenticated, time-bounded ticket that securely migrates the active session key to the target server over a pre-shared inter-server channel, allowing the resource-constrained device to roam without renegotiating key material with the remote operator. The protocol integrates a PUF for unclonable device-to-server authentication, biometrics with a Fuzzy Extractor for operator-to-server authentication, a dynamic pseudo-identity update rule driven by the newly agreed session key to guarantee non-traceability, and an Access Control List (ACL) check embedded in the authentication flow with an explicit grant/revoke/version lifecycle. The security of the protocol is formally validated under both the symbolic Dolev–Yao model using ProVerif and the computational Real-or-Random (RoR) model with a full game-hopping reduction under the Random Oracle and IND-CPA assumptions. The trust-model limits are honestly disclosed: the baseline protocol achieves weak forward secrecy rather than perfect forward secrecy, and a PFS extension based on ephemeral Diffie–Hellman is described. We instantiate and evaluate the protocol in the Internet of Drones (IoD) setting, where Unmanned Aerial Vehicles act as the resource-constrained device. The cryptographic primitives are empirically measured on an ESP32-S3 testbed running mbed TLS v3.4. Performance evaluation under platform-normalised comparison shows that the session-preserving handover incurs only ≈ 0.143 ms of cryptographic computation and 1056 bits on the device side, yielding an end-to-end handover latency of ≈ 19 ms, a 46%–62% reduction relative to full re-authentication baselines. The construction generalises to any AKE deployment that combines PUF-based device attestation, biometric operator binding, and cross-domain device mobility.