An efficient authentication and key agreement scheme for security-aware unmanned aerial vehicles assisted data harvesting in Internet of Things

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) devices are majorly used for remote collection and delivery of data for the operation of systems such as precision agriculture, military, e-health, and weather forecast. On most occasions, these devices are sited in remote locations without existing or reliable telecommunication networks, which makes real-time data delivery impossible. To mitigate this, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) assisted system has been integrated into IoT data harvesting. However, this requires an authentication and key-agreement scheme capable of securing the harvested data and performing dynamic accessibility-mapping of IoT devices to a specific UAV such that each UAV will be able to identify its devices during harvesting without compromising the integrity and confidentiality of the harvested data. In this paper, we propose an authentication and key-agreement scheme for UAVs assisted IoT data harvesting. To achieve this, we developed n-Divide Loyalty Pairing (n-DLP) and a linear time sequence-based cartesian tree structure to secure the harvested data, and Chinese remainder theorem for a dynamic accessibility-mapping of different IoT devices to different UAVs. The experimental results and security analysis showed that the scheme secured the harvested data at low communication and computation overheads. Also, the results showed that the scheme has an insignificant effect on the mean waiting times of the data harvesting system.