An Efficient and Reliable User Access Protocol for Internet of Drones.

The Internet of Drones (IoD) has blown up the interest of academia and industry due to their deployment in military and civil fields. In the IoD environment, drones collect and transmit real-time data to the users through an insecure wireless medium. A secure and efficient authentication protocol is required to ensure that only authorized drones communicate and send data to authentic users. For this purpose, Zhang et al. introduced an authentication protocol for the IoD environment and asserted that it could hold out against many known attacks. However, after cautious scrutiny, this paper manifests that many shortcomings still exist in their protocol design. This article introduces an enhanced, lightweight, and secure protocol for the IoD environment to mitigate the drawbacks of Zhang et al.'s protocol. The performance comparison depicts that the proposed scheme provides enhanced security with minimal computation cost. This rise in communication cost is legitimate as the proposed protocol renders better protection than the preceding protocols. The formal automated analysis is carried out via ProVerif to prove that the proposed scheme withstands numerous attacks.