PDCM-IoD: A Lightweight PUF-Based Drone Access Control Mechanism for Internet of Drones

Abstract

The growing number of uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones in low altitude airspace has opened a multitude of frontiers in diverse applications such as smart city, disaster management, logistics, and surveillance operations. Nonetheless, the open and dynamic communication landscape leads the Internet of Drones (IoD) environment to many security threats, including forgery, unauthorized access, or physical drone hijacking attacks. One of the pressing challenges is to ensure perfect forward secrecy using symmetric crypto-primitives. Most of the conventional access control schemes rely on costly public key cryptosystems that might not be suitable for a constrained environment. We can spot many lightweight key agreement mechanisms for the IoD environment; however, regrettably, security loopholes render those inappropriate for deployment. In this article, we propose a lightweight access control mechanism for IoD environment leveraging a physically unclonable functions (PUF) based on barrel shifter (BS) architectures. The commutative properties of BS-oriented PUF (BS-PUF) have been exploited to ensure perfect forward secrecy in PDCM-IoD. Moreover, it ensures privacy, revocation of rogue users’ identity, and resistance to known attacks, including physical drone capture threats and forgery attacks. It significantly helps to reduce computational overheads in comparison with other IoD-based schemes. The security features are rigorously analyzed using the real-or-random (RoR)-based random oracle model. Overall, the PDCM-IoD supports a 19.52% increase number of security features. The performance evaluation depicts that PDCM-IoD is highly suitable for an IoD-based resource-deficient ecosystem.

Keywords: Attacks, authentication, Internet of Drones (IoD), physically unclonable function, privacy protection.