BSP-IoD: A Secure Drone-Enabled Authentication Protocol Using Barrel-Shifter PUF

Abstract

Because of the rapid proliferation of uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs), also termed as drones, the Internet of Drones (IoD) has revolutionized various domains, including disaster response, smart surveillance, and remote sensing, by facilitating real-time collection of aerial data using autonomous coordination. However, the exposed communication landscape of IoD networks renders them highly susceptible to known threats, including forgery, impersonation, and physical capture threats. Most of the conventional key agreement techniques are costly for computations and not suitable for resource-constrained IoD systems, which necessitate low-cost yet secure authentication mechanisms. However, many lightweight drone authentication schemes have been presented, but with security limitations. This study suggested a novel barrel-shifter physically unclonable function (BS-PUF)-based drone authentication protocol (BSP-IoD) to augment the security of the IoD network. Leveraging the intrinsic randomness, commutative, and invertible properties of BS-PUF, the BSP-IoD ensures the construction of a mutually agreed session key employing unique challenge-response pairs (CRPs). The scheme could withstand known threats, besides supporting perfect forward secrecy and privacy to the user. The BSP-IoD considerably mitigates computational overheads, besides ensuring resilience against known attacks, including resistance to drone physical capture threats, promoting viability for next-generation IoD networks. The formal analysis and performance assessment exhibit that BSP-IoD could address the critical challenges of next-generation IoD applications. Furthermore, it supports 56.6% more security properties as compared to preceding schemes.

Keywords: Internet of drones, Uncrewed aerial vehicles, Drone authentication, Barrel-shifter PUF, Physically unclonable function