PRLAP-IoD: A PUF-based Robust and Lightweight Authentication Protocol for Internet of Drones

In recent years, the industry and research have cast great attention to the Internet of Drones (IoD), which is becoming progressively popular since it can bring a great convenience to various application scenarios, such as national map exploration, public safety monitoring and automated military applications. In these scenarios, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) (called drones) will be used to collect private information. Due to the fact that the private information are very sensitive, and drones working in public places easily suffer from physical capture or tampering attacks, the primary concern is that this information could be collected by adversaries or unauthorized users. In addition, as resource-constrained devices, drones are mostly equipped with small memory and have limited computing power. Therefore, how to ensure robust security as much as possible while achieving lightweight computing and communication costs has become an urgent problem to be solved in this field. In this paper, we propose A PUF-based Robust and Lightweight Authentication Protocol for Drone-Gateway and Drone-Drone Communication (PRLAP-IoD) to address these issues. Both formal security validation using conventional tools (ROR Model and AVISPA) and other informal security analysis clearly demonstrate that PRLAP-IoD can not only provide physical security, but also defend against a variety of known attacks. Finally, compared with the recent Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) schemes, PRLAP-IoD can attain a delicate balance between computation cost and communication cost in IoD environment.