An Edge Assisted Secure Lightweight Authentication Technique for Safe Communication on the Internet of Drones Network

Security and privacy are among the most critical challenges on the internet of drones (IoD) network. The communication entities of the IoD network can communicate securely with the use of authenticated key agreement (AKA) based techniques. However, the design of such techniques must balance the tradeoff between security and lightweight features. Recently, Chen et al. proposed an authentication and key sharing scheme for IoD deployment. It is, however, realized after scrutiny that the proposed technique is vulnerable to security attacks under the well-accepted Canetti-Krawczyk (CK) adversary model. Moreover, the scheme applies to the IoD network with only one drones' flying zone. To solve these challenges, this paper proposed a secure lightweight proven authenticated key agreement (SLPAKA) technique for IoD deployment. The technique is free from all the problems identified in the scheme of Chen et al. To ensure the reliability of the SLPAKA, the security of the technique has been assessed from a theoretical method and formal way using the ProVerif cryptographic protocol verification tool. Apart from comparing the performance of SLPAKA with the benchmarking schemes in terms of security, computational cost, and communication cost, the SLPAKA and the technique proposed by Chen et al. are implemented using a python programming language to evaluate and compare their performance in terms of energy consumption and computational time metrics. The results show that the SLPAKA outperforms the technique of Chen et al. and all the other benchmarking techniques in terms of security and lightweight features.