Secure Communication Framework for Blockchain-Based Internet of Drones-Enabled Aerial Computing Deployment

Abstract

Internet of Drones (IoD)-enabled aerial computing can effectively reduce communication delay and energy consumption as compared to conventional computing environments. It seems very useful for its deployment in disaster areas, emergency relief and battlefield communications. However, different types of attacks, such as replay, man-in-the-middle, impersonation, credential leakage, and other types of data modifications, are possible in an IoD-based communication environment. Therefore, we need a highly robust security protocol to prevent the occurrence of these types of attacks in IoD-enabled aerial computing environments. Moreover, blockchain, a tamper-proof technology, adds more security in the designed security protocol. To cope with these issues, we propose a “blockchain-based secure communication framework for Internet of Drones enabled aerial computing deployment (BCF-IoDAC)”. We also provide a security analysis of the proposed BCF-IoDAC which proves its resilience against various types of passive and active attacks. The security and performance comparison of the proposed BCF-IoDAC is conducted with the closely related existing schemes, and its performance is also better than the compared schemes, as BCF-IoDAC provides more security and functionality features with low computation and communication costs. In addition, the blockchain-based practical demonstration of the proposed BCF-IoDAC is provided to measure its impact on the computational time on a varied number of transactions per block and a varied number of blocks mined in the blockchain.