Authentication and key agreement mechanisms for internet of drones: A novel taxonomy, critical review, and experimental performance analysis

The continuous progress and distinct capabilities have led the Internet of Drones (IoD) to be a persuasive paradigm that offers promising advantages across various applications, spanning from defense to civilian uses. Despite its manifold benefits, it is essential to highlight that it also faces several challenges, and security remains a critical concern that can hold back its widespread adoption. Stringent authentication mechanism design has appeared as one of the favorable techniques for tackling distinct security attacks in IoD networks. This survey presents a detailed review of existing literature, focusing on authentication protocols explicitly designed for securing communication in IoD networks. Recognising the growing complexity and diversity of communication, we present a novel multi-layered taxonomy that offers a comprehensive roadmap for classifying authentication mechanisms across the IoD stack. The presented taxonomy interactively maps each authentication technique to its system roles, cryptographic foundations, and operational context within the IoD network to demonstrate a more holistic understanding of prevalent authentication mechanisms. Drawing from our presented taxonomy, we highlight the compelling contributions and acknowledge the potential limitations of the recent literature. We compare the security and resistance to common attacks of prevalent protocols while highlighting their advantages and limitations. Based on the security analysis, we shortlist protocols for full-scale implementation that exhibit the highest security coverage. We then present a detailed experimental analysis of these selected protocols against various metrics (i.e., CPU execution time, memory consumption, etc.) using a Holybro QAV250 quadcopter drone-based testbed setup. Finally, we discuss future challenges that require joint efforts from academia and industry.