PAF-IoD: PUF-Enabled Authentication Framework for the Internet of Drones

The rise of smart cities and the increasing demand for drones has sparked considerable interest in the Internet of Drones (IoD) within the realms of academia and industry. IoD presents a multitude of advantages in smart city settings, facilitating services like traffic monitoring, environmental surveillance, and disaster management by harnessing the potential of IoT and Flying Ad-Hoc Networks (FANET) infrastructures. However, the transmission of sensitive messages between drones in IoD-based smart cities is disseminated over insecure channels, leaving them exposed to security vulnerabilities. Furthermore, drones operating in IoD architectures are prone to physical capture attacks as they operate in unattended environments with minimal human intervention. Moreover, the limited resources of drones pose challenges to the practicality of employing computationally intensive cryptographic methods. In response to these challenges, we introduce PAF-IoD, an authentication framework that prioritizes security and efficiency. PAF-IoD leverages physical unclonable functions (PUFs) and the AEGIS authenticated encryption scheme to guarantee trustworthy and secure communication between users and drones in smart cities. In terms of security validation, we perform both random and real model-based formal analyses. Furthermore, we employ the Scyther tool to ensure the resilience of PAF-IoD against different security vulnerabilities. Additionally, an informal analysis is conducted to demonstrate the resilience of PAF-IoD against various attacks. By introducing PAF-IoD, we offer a secure solution that addresses vulnerabilities and resource limitations associated with drone communication. The proposed framework guarantees the integrity and confidentiality of data while optimizing computational and communication resources, thereby enabling reliable and effective IoD operations in smart cities.