A Secure Communication Protocol for Drones and Smart Objects

Abstract

In many envisioned drone-based applications, drones will communicate with many different smart objects, such as sensors and embedded devices. Securing such communications requires an effective and efficient encryption key establishment protocol. However, the design of such a protocol must take into account constrained resources of smart objects and the mobility of drones. In this paper, a secure communication protocol between drones and smart objects is presented. To support the required security functions, such as authenticated key agreement, non-repudiation, and user revocation, we propose an efficient Certificateless Signcryption Tag Key Encapsulation Mechanism (eCLSC-TKEM). eCLSC-TKEM reduces the time required to establish a shared key between a drone and a smart object by minimizing the computational overhead at the smart object. Also, our protocol improves drone's efficiency by utilizing dual channels which allows many smart objects to concurrently execute eCLSC-TKEM. We evaluate our protocol on commercially available devices, namely AR.Drone2.0 and TelosB, by using a parking management testbed. Our experimental results show that our protocol is much more efficient than other protocols.