SELTHA: Secure, Efficient and Lightweight Authentication Mechanism for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Network
Waqas Salam, Syed Muhammad Khaliq-ur-Rahman Raazi, Nauman Hafeez Ansari · 2023
The Internet of Drones (IoD) is the most common, fast-growing, and emerging application of the Internet of Things (IoT). Due to the vast use of Unmanned Aerial vehicles commonly called as drones in IoD applications such as Rescue and Search Operations, Wild Life Monitoring, Photography and Video Recording, Military Spying Missions, Package Delivery, Agriculture, etc. It has tremendously increased the challenges of Safety, Security, and Privacy. To secure drone communication and counters the security threats caused by unauthorized drones and malicious cyber invaders who can have access to sensitive information. IoD needs an Authentication mechanism that utilizes less computational power and resources because drones are equipped with limited battery power that can reduce their battery lifetime by using the existing Authentication methods of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) Asymmetric cryptography like Digital certificate and Digital Signature that are resource intensive cryptographic functions. We proposed the mechanism SELTHA: Secure, Efficient, and Lightweight TOTP based Hashed Authentication that is specifically designed to reduce the computational resources and power consumption overhead and ensure security challenges, and threats encountered. SELTHA negotiates the flight session key with the registered drone and stores its flight plan and session key in its central database for that specific session. It uses a one-time session key to calculate the Hashed Message Authentication code HMAC-SHA256 for message authentication and sent TOTP code along with the message authentication as the two-factor authentication mechanism. To show the feasibility of SETLHA, we implement the prototype simulation on the Windows host machine using PBKDF2, HMAC-SHA256, and TOTP algorithms. Results show that the SELTHA authentication mechanism has achieved the lowest total communication cost and UAV computation cost which significantly reduced the battery power consumption to enhance the UAV battery lifetime. SELTHA in contrast to other authentication mechanisms is suitable to implement practically.