PUF‐Based Lightweight Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for Secure Internet of Drones in Smart City

ABSTRACT With the introduction of the concept of smart cities and the widespread application of drones in areas such as traffic monitoring, air quality monitoring, and emergency medical response, the rapid development and emergence of the Internet of Drones (IoD) have been driven forward. Drones, as a critical component of IoD, leverage their advantage in airspace coverage and real‐time dynamic response capabilities. Through the IoD framework, they enable multi‐drone collaboration and real‐time data sharing, making them an essential part of smart cities. However, drones, as resource‐constrained devices, are unable to perform overly complex computations or utilize public‐key cryptographic techniques. Therefore, we have designed a lightweight authentication and key agreement scheme based on Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) for the smart city environment. By completing the user registration phase over a public channel, it is better suited for the actual deployment of IoD in smart cities. Using the Real‐or‐Random (RoR) model and the widely recognized formal analysis tool ProVerif, we conducted a formal analysis of the proposed scheme, ensuring its security. We also evaluated the computational cost and communication overhead of the designed scheme. The results show that the proposed scheme is better suited for IoD‐based smart city environments, offering lower computational costs, reduced communication overhead, and improved security.