Private blockchain-based access control mechanism for unauthorized UAV detection and mitigation in Internet of Drones environment

Drones, which are also known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), are very useful in delivering the packages, and real-time object detection and tracking with minimal human interference. However, there may be several security threats in such an environment, for instance, a malicious user can spy unauthorized drones, transfer malicious packages, or even damage the network reliability that can have direct impact on drones control. This may lead to a potential threat for people, governments, and business sectors. To deal with these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel access control scheme for unauthorized UAV detection and mitigation in an Internet of Drones (IoD) environment, called ACSUD-IoD. With the help of the blockchain-based solution incorporated in ACSUD-IoD, the transactional data having both the normal secure data from a drone (UAV) to the Ground Station Server (GSS) and the abnormal (suspected) data for detection of unauthorized UAVs by the GSS are stored in private blockchain, that are authentic and genuine. As a result, the Big data analytics can be performed on the authenticated transactional data stored in the blockchain. Through the detailed security analysis including formal security under the broadly-accepted Real-Or-Random (ROR) model, formal security verification using the widely-applied Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool and non-mathematical security analysis show the robustness of the proposed scheme against a number of potential attacks needed in an IoD environment. The testbed experiments for various cryptographic primitives using the broadly-accepted Multiprecision Integer and Rational Arithmetic Cryptographic Library (MIRACL) have been performed under both server and Raspberry PI 3 configurations. Furthermore, a detailed comparative analysis among the proposed scheme and other existing competing schemes shows the efficacy and more robustness as compared to the existing schemes. Finally, the blockchain-based practical demonstration shows the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.