A Hybrid Authentication Approach (LPCAP-IoD) To Enhance Security in Internet of Drones (IoD)

Abstract

The Internet of Drones (IoD) is a field where a lot of research is underway due to the ever growing demand and applications in all domain of life such as miliary (for Information sharing, search & rescue, surveillance, imagery, payload transfer etc), socio-economic development, agriculture, shipment/ delivery services, disaster management and fire fighting. However, the open and dynamic nature of IoD environments makes them vulnerable to various security attacks/ threats such as replay attacks, impersonation attacks, eavesdropping, drone hijacking, physical attacks, quantum computing threats etc. Various schemes have been proposed by the researcher to enhance security aspects related to authentication protocol of IoD. However, all have their short coming due to a trade off between security features and computation/ communication costs. This thesis proposes a hybrid authentication protocol for IoD that combines Lattice-based Cryptography, Chebyshev Chaotic Maps and Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) and provide resistance against advanced security attacks/ threats including quantum computing threats. The proposed scheme has been termed as LPCAP-IoD (Lattice, PUF and Chaotic Maps based Authentication Protocol - Internet of Drones). The formal and informal comprehensive security testing of proposed protocol has been undertaken by utilizing tools like ProVerif an NS-3. Furthermore, efficiency of the protocol has been determined by calculating the desired computational and communication costs and comparing them with the existing authentication schemes. The results of our formal and informal security testing demonstrate that the protocol is resistant to Quantum Computing Attacks as well as against a wide range of advance attacks and is suitable for IoD environment where security is paramount. Future research directions are also discussed to further enhance the security and scalability of our proposed protocol.