CoMSeC++: PUF-based secured light-weight mutual authentication protocol for Drone-enabled WSN

An unattended environment like a disputed area, a battlefield, or a dense forest area is an environment that is completely inaccessible. Hence, certain kinds of activities that may occur in such an environment would be difficult to notice, which actually is required to be known. Therefore, sensors could be mounted in those places so that the essential data could be gathered. In this paper, we are considering an unattended environment with sensors mounted at certain spots from which the data could be collected through mobile device which actually is an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) or say, Drone. We have first designed a suitable architecture for the same and designed a light-weight protocol to establish a secure communication among devices and the cloud via the relocatable drone. Our protocol also utilizes the benefits of Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) to generate, which is used to encrypt the message in communication. The well-popular Scyther simulator has been used to simulate the protocol and the results shows that the protocol is completely protected against leakage of private information. Considering the hardness problem of hash function and PUF, the informal analysis also confirms the high-level security protection against known attacks. The protocol is not only better in terms of security strength, but it also achieves better performance when compared to existing competitive works.