PUFloc: PUF and Location Based Hierarchical Mutual Authentication Protocol for Surveillance Drone Networks

The security hazards in the digital sky of drones urges for lightweight and secure defense mechanisms against several cyber-attacks on drone networks. The main issues in a surveillance drone network are identification of valid drones, maintaining boundaries and information security along with physical security. To address these issues we are proposing a lightweight and secure drone-to-ground station and drone-to-drone mutual authentication protocol, PUFloc, using Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) and drone location data. PUFloc ensures attack resiliency and fail safe operation and uses only hash functions, XOR operations, PUF and random number generators. This is the first work that addresses physical security along with location validation of drones for mutually authenticating the drone with the ground station with minimum resource overheads and maximum security. Formal security analysis is done using random oracle model and ProVerif tool and informal security analysis also proves the resistance of our protocol against several possible attacks. FPGA implementation of the major cryptographic operations to estimate the power consumption and resource utilization show that the operations are lightweight to be implemented on drones. The analysis of performance and security and their comparison with existing works showcase the merit of PUFloc over other protocols.