A biometric and physically unclonable function–Based authentication protocol for payload exchanges in internet of drones

Internet of Drones (IoD) has been deployed in numerous military and civilian domains to offer services such as target surveillance, traffic monitoring, disaster handling and environmental monitoring. However, message exchanges among the drones and ground station servers are via insecure wireless channels. In addition, drones may be deployed in hostile and unattended locations. This renders the IoD susceptible to numerous privacy and security threats such as drone capture and cloning. Therefore, many security solutions have been developed based on techniques such as blockchain and public key infrastructure. However, majority of these schemes are still susceptible to many attacks while some of them are inefficient for the resource-limited IoD devices. In this paper, a Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) challenge-response and biometric based robust authentication protocol is presented. Its formal security is carried out using the Real or Random (RoR) model, which demonstrates the robustness of the negotiated session key. In addition, its semantic analysis shows that it can withstand typical IoD attacks such as impersonation, replay, de-synchronization and spoofing. In terms of performance, it is shown to incur lower computation, energy and communication costs.