Chebyshev Polynomial and Private Blockchain Based Cross-Domain Authentication Protocol for IoD Networks

With the maturity of Internet of Things (IoT), one of its descendants, Internet of Drones (IoD) has reached far beyond its proposers' vision in the recent decade. The IoD paradigm inherits the advantages of its predecessor, however, it also has its own unique challenges due to the drone's limited resources as well as the large scale deployment of services. As drones might be deployed for critical missions that span over a wide geographical area, the security and feasibility concerns are raised when drones are communicating with the ground stations located in different domains. Lately, blockchain has quickly become the preferred technique to realize the cross-domain communications in the IoD environment. Nonetheless, the current schemes either implement authentication and key agreement with resource-hungry operations, do not provide all required/vital security guarantees, or have inherent security flaws. To tackle the abovementioned issues, we propose a Chebyshev polynomial and private blockchain based authentication protocol (hereafter referred to as polyBlock) for cross-domain communications in the IoD environment. In the polyBlock, the Chebyshev polynomial technique is adopted to validate the identity of drone and negotiate the session key with the ground station, while the private blockchain is utilized to store the drone's cryptographic information. Through carrying out the security validation on polyBlock using the automated tool AVISPA, we claim that the polyBlock is completely free of security design flaws and is capable to operate safely in the adversarial settings. In addition, we implement the polyBlock and two benchmark schemes in the Eclipse-based simulation environment, and measure their performance in terms of execution time and communication overhead. Based on experimental results, we conclude that the polyBlock can provide more superior performance than its counterparts.