PUF-Based Hardware Security for Trusted Internet of Drones: Challenges and Future Directions
Sufian Al Majmaie, Niraj Prasad Bhatta, Premnath G. Kharat, Fathi Amsaad · 2025
The rapid growth of the Internet of Drones (IoD) has unlocked transformative applications across military, disaster management, and smart city domains. However, the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of IoD networks introduces significant security challenges, particularly in authentication and access control. This paper explores the potential of Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) as a lightweight, hardware-based authentication mechanism to enhance IoD security. A comprehensive review of state-of-the-art PUF-based authentication frameworks is conducted, analyzing their resistance to spoofing, replay attacks, and node impersonation. Our findings indicate that PUFbased authentication mechanisms provide higher resilience to security threats compared to conventional cryptographic methods by offering tamper-resistant, challenge-response authentication without requiring stored keys. Additionally, we identify key limitations of PUF implementations, including environmental sensitivity and vulnerability to modeling attacks, and discuss mitigation strategies through dynamic recalibration and machine learning-based enhancement techniques. The results demonstrate that PUF-authenticated IoD devices significantly improve trust and security, making them a viable alternative for scalable and resource-efficient authentication.