An efficient three-factor remote user authentication protocol based on BPV-FourQ for internet of drones

Abstract

Due to the mobility, flexibility and autonomy of drones, the Internet of Drones (IoD) have gained momentum recently and are being widely used in a variety of fields, such as agriculture, industry, and transportation. However, due to the intrinsic openness of wireless communication channels in IoD, the data generated by drones are facing new security challenges and privacy issues. To ensure the confidentiality of data communication, it is crucial to authenticate remote users and establish session keys for IoD through the authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocol. Unfortunately, most existing AKA protocols using asymmetric cryptographic primitives are computationally expensive, and are unaffordable for the computing power limited drones. To this end, this paper presents an efficient three-factor AKA protocol for IoD based on FourQ and Boyko-Peinado-Venkatesan (BPV) pre-calculation. The detailed security analysis reveals that our protocol is secure against known attacks and achieves important security goals, especially perfect forward secrecy. Besides, by performing real world experiments on the Raspberry Pi, we demonstrate that the improved FourQ curve primitive is 4–5 times faster than the conventional elliptic curve primitives. The security and performance comparison are also given to prove that the proposed protocol provides stronger security and higher efficiency than existing ones.