PARTH: A two-stage lightweight mutual authentication protocol for UAV surveillance networks

UAVs are being widely deployed in security and surveillance applications around the world. Due to deployment in remote environments and also due to limited resources on these devices, they are susceptible to device capture and physical tampering attacks. This heightens the risk of sensitive data stored in the UAVs to be captured by adversaries. To address this issue, a two-stage lightweight mutual authentication protocol is presented in this paper, well suited to SDN-backed multi UAV networks deployed in surveillance areas. Formal security proof of the protocol is presented to highlight its security features. We also compare our protocol with other state-of-the-art works in terms of computation latency and resilience against known security attacks.