SLAP-IoD: Secure and Lightweight Authentication Protocol Using Physical Unclonable Functions for Internet of Drones in Smart City Environments

With the emergence of the concept of smart city and the increasing demands for a range of drones, Internet of Drones (IoD) has achieved a variety of attention by providing multiple benefits in academia and industry. IoD offers numerous services, such as traffic monitoring, environmental monitoring, and disaster management by combining infrastructure, Internet of Things (IoT), and Flying Ad-Hoc Networks (FANET) in smart city environments. However, communication among drones is vulnerable to potential security threats because the sensitive messages in various applications are exchanged via an insecure channel in IoD-based smart city environments. Since IoDs can be operated in unattended environment with minimum human interventions, smart devices (e.g., drones and sensors) deployed in IoD architectures are vulnerable to physical capture attacks. In addition, drones are resource-constrained in terms of computation and communication overheads, and it is not much viable to apply public key cryptography (PKC) that requires high computation and communication overheads. Thus, we design a secure and lightweight authentication protocol using a physical unclonable function (PUF) for IoD to guarantee reliable and useful services in smart city environments, called SLAP-IoD. We prove the security of the SLAP-IoD using informal and formal security analyses using the broadly recognized Real-Or-Random (ROR) random oracle model, and also through the formal security verification using the widely-accepted Automated Validation of Internet Security-sensitive Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) security verification. Furthermore, we compare the performance of the SLAP-IoD with related schemes. Consequently, we show that SLAP-IoD offers better security and efficiency than other related schemes and is suitable for IoD-based smart city environments.