Blockchain-based privacy-preserving authentication protocol for UAV networks

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are getting common in the market nowadays and being used in numerous real-time applications because they are lightweight, cost-effective, easy to control. With the growth of emerging UAV technology, it also needs to improve the security in many applications that are using this technology for solving multipurpose use cases. However, the malicious use of UAVs threatens privacy and security, so there is an immense need to secure critical information by preventing the UAVs from being tampered with denial of service (DoS) attacks, impersonation attacks, and man-in-the-middle attacks. To fulfill such a goal, in this paper, we design a new blockchain-envisioned authenticated key agreement mechanism in a UAV network. We prove the security of our proposed protocol using the random oracle model and also with the AVISPA tool under the given adversarial model. We also provide the informal security analysis that shows the protocol is secure against various attacks such as man-in-the-middle attack, denial of service attack and impersonation attack. Furthermore, to realize the performance of our proposed protocol, we perform comparative analysis in terms of security features, communication, and computation costs. We show that the proposed protocol performs better than Kaur et al. by 10.45%. Finally, the comparative analysis shows that the proposed protocol offers better communication and computation performance and added security features as compared to the state-of-the-art authentication protocols.