ABSTRACT Unmanned aerial‐vehicle (UAV) networks have been ubiquitous and play an inevitable role in internet‐of‐drones. Their reliance on mesh networking and the MAVLink protocol makes them highly vulnerable to severe and potentially lethal cyberattacks. The classical public‐key encryption/decryption scheme employing integer‐factorization and primitive‐root‐type problems (such as the RSA system) has been commonly used for many years; however, its security is compromised by future advancements in quantum computing (through Shor's algorithm). In this work, we present a quantum‐secure authentication protocol for UAV‐based IoD applications, emphasizing user anonymity. A security analysis is presented which guarantees correctness, privacy, and robustness against numerous active and passive attacks in both the classical and quantum settings. Moreover, a real‐time testbed experiment of running time on Raspberry Pi 5 boards to evaluate the computational overhead of different cryptographic primitives illustrates its practicality. Finally, a performance comparison of filtering accuracy and resistance to unknown attacks with related existing schemes demonstrates its scalability and usefulness in real‐world applications.
Godara et al. (Sun,) studied this question.