Efficient and Secure Data Sharing for 5G Flying Drones: A Blockchain-Enabled Approach

The drone's open and untrusted environment may create problems for authentication and data sharing. To address this issue, we propose a blockchain-enabled efficient and secure data sharing model for 5G flying drones. In this model, blockchain and attribute-based encryption (ABE) are applied to ensure the security of instruction issues and data sharing. The authentication mechanism in the model employs a smart contract for authentication and access control, public key cryptography for providing accounts and ensuring accounts' security, and a distributed ledger for security audit. In addition, to speed up out-sourced computations and reduce electricity consumption, an ABE model with parallel outsourced computation (ABEM-POC) is constructed, and a generic parallel computation method for ABE is proposed. The analysis of the experimental results shows that parallel computation significantly improves the speed of outsourced encryption and decryption compared to serial computation.