A secure and lightweight batch authentication scheme for Internet of Drones environment

Internet of Drones (IoD) ushered in a rapid growth period and is gradually expanded from military field to civilian field. Currently, there are more and more scenarios where multiple drones are needed to complete a task together. Usually, identity authentication is required to ensure the execution of the task. The existing authentication schemes are basically aimed at the authentication of a single drone. For the multiple-drones scenario, the authentication protocol needs to be executed one by one for all the participating drones, which is extremely inefficient and will directly affect the efficiency of task execution. Therefore, we propose a novel lightweight authentication scheme, which supports users' batch authentication of multiple drones to ensure high efficiency of authentication. In our scheme, we only use hash function and point multiplication to complete batch authentication. In addition, Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are introduced into our scheme to resist physical capture attack. Furthermore, our formal and informal security analyses reveal that our scheme can withstand most known attacks. The experimental result shows that our scheme can provide better security and lower storage and computation overheads when authenticating multiple drones, as compared with existing similar schemes.