An Efficient Privacy-Preserving Authenticated Key Agreement Scheme for Edge-Assisted Internet of Drones

There has been a a significant increase in the popularity of using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), popularly known as drones, in several applications. In many application scenarios, UAVs are deployed in missions where sensitive data is collected, such as monitoring critical infrastructure, industrial facilities, crops, and public safety. Due to the sensitive and/or safety critical nature of the data collected in these applications, it is imperative to consider the security, and privacy aspects of the UAVs used in these scenarios. In this article, we propose an efficient privacy aware authenticated key agreement scheme for edge-assisted UAVs (Internet of Drones). Unlike the existing security solutions for UAVs, the proposed scheme does not need to store any secret keys in the devices but still can provide the desired security features. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work where physical security of the UAV has been taken into account. The proposed system allows third-party communication, and mobile edge computing service providers to authenticate the UAVs without any loss of provacy, and outperforms existing methods in terms of computational complexity.