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Securing Cross-Domain Internet of Drones: An RFF-PUF Allied Authenticated Key Exchange Protocol With Over-the-Air Enrollment

Xuanyu Chen et al.

The paper addresses the security challenges in the Internet of Drones (IoD), specifically focusing on lightweight mutual authentication and key exchange protocols for cross-domain deployments. The authors identify limitations in existing solutions, such as high computational overhead, reliance on third parties, insecure secret storage on drones, and inflexible enrollment procedures. To overcome these challenges, they propose a novel authenticated key exchange protocol that integrates Radio Frequency Fingerprint (RFF) identification and Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) technologies. The methodology involves a two-phase approach: Over-the-Air (OTA) enrollment using RFF for initial device identification and secure provisioning, followed by a Mutual Authentication and Key Exchange (MAKE) phase leveraging PUFs for direct authentication and key generation between drones or between a drone and a ground station. The PUF is co-designed with One-Time-Pad (OTP) encryption to achieve ephemeral keying and eliminate the need for storing secrets within drones. The protocol's security is rigorously analyzed through both informal security analysis and formal verification using ProVerif. The key findings demonstrate the resilience of the proposed protocol against common security attacks, including replay, Man-in-the-Middle (MITM), and impersonation attacks. The proposed protocol also outperforms existing IoD authentication schemes in terms of security features and reduces computation, communication, and storage overhead. This research matters to the field as it provides a practical and lightweight solution for secure and seamless cross-domain operation of drones, addressing a critical need in emerging IoD applications.