A secure authentication scheme framework for mobile-sinks used in the Internet of Drones applications

Within the last decade, communication technologies have evolved rapidly, and this caused significant advancements for Internet of Things (IoT) applications and services. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), popularly known as drones, has attracted the interest of researches because of their fundamental attributes such as mobility, flexibility, reliability and energy efficiency in wireless networks. Similar to wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and other remote sensing applications, these devices are generally not designed with integrated security mechanisms. Furthermore, the existing solutions in which the main focus is on drone communication security are quite limited in the literature. Since the UAVs have the potential to handle very sensitive data, the exchange of information over wireless channels can cause serious exposures. The authentication schemes to be employed should be handled with care because of the limited resources and energy available with the sensor nodes. The existing enabling UAV technologies have restricted authentication privileges for their interaction with WSNs. In this paper, UAVs which can act like mobile-sinks are considered and existing work on WSN-UAV environment authentication is extended. A secure authentication framework using elliptic-curve crypto-systems is presented. The proposed framework is evaluated to ensure it is resilient to significant well-known potential attacks related with data confidentiality, mutual authentication, password guessing, and key impersonation.