A PUF‐based lightweight authentication and key agreement protocol for smart UAV networks

Abstract

With the advancement of information technology and the reduction of costs, the application of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has gradually expanded from the military field to the industrial field and civilian field. It brings great convenience to people in surveillance, detection, transportation, emergency rescue etc. However, UAVs usually work in harsh natural environments, and their communication security confronts various challenges. Due to UAVs' limited resources, such as computing capability, storage space, and energy, traditional security protection schemes based on complex cryptographic algorithms are not suitable for UAV systems directly. Therefore, a two‐stage lightweight identity authentication and key agreement protocol for UAV is proposed in this paper. The entire process only uses hash and XOR operations, which significantly improves the authentication efficiency. Simultaneously, the physical unclonable function (PUF) is introduced and embedded into the UAV hardware to ensure UAV network communication security when a UAV suffers a physical capture attack. In the paper, the security of the proposed protocol is proved with Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic, Real‐or‐Random (ROR) model, and AVISPA simulation tools. An informal security analysis is also provided to illustrate that the protocol satisfies the security requirements of UAV networks. Finally, the protocol is compared with other existing protocols regarding function properties, computation cost, and communication cost, which shows that the proposed protocol has effectiveness and practicality.

LCDMA: Lightweight Cross-Domain Mutual Identity Authentication Scheme for Internet of Things

“…The protocol uses XOR for processing strings and random fill for encrypting PUF responses. There are many similar protocols [25], [26], [27] that are also based on PUF-designed authentication protocols for IoT. While these protocols are effective against many of the current mainstream attacks and reduce computing and storage overhead, the PUF is weak in stability and aging resistance.…”

A Review on Software-Based and Hardware-Based Authentication Mechanisms for the Internet of Drones

“…Although there were no keys stored onboard the drones, the results indicated that the PARTH protocol is capable of countering drone tampering, replay, man-in-the-middle, and impersonation attacks. Moreover, an efficient two-stage authentication and key agreement protocol for three-layer, UAV-enabled networks was introduced in [27], where each of the network layers was associated with a specific entity, i.e., the member drones, the head drones, or the trusted GS. The member drones were employed to gather critical data and forward the required data to GSs via the intermediate head drones.…”

“…Authentication of Drones: An acoustic signal, a flight trajectory, a gyroscope, or a specialized PUF chip can be used to verify the identity of a drone within the IoD [27].…”

“…To strengthen the identification, authentication, and access control, the implementation of PUFs has been recently suggested [24,25,27]. PUFs constitute a simple and cost-effective means of protecting hardware.…”

Lightweight unmanned aerial vehicle video object detection based on spatial‐temporal correlation

“…Over the past decades, the hardware processing capacity of edge computing devices has been greatly increased, which also promotes the design and development of intelligent UAVs. [1][2][3][4][5] The quick development of deep learning technique has provided a powerful tool for intelligent UAVs to gain practical application, particularly in the computer vision area. 5,6 Intelligent UAVs can eliminate the need for operators, allowing investigators to focus on the use of the UAVs' own data.…”