Abstract:
The evolution of drone-based communication has given rise to the Internet of Drones (IoD) paradigm. Drones are currently employed for data collection in diverse monitoring applications such as border security, forest fire management, smart farming, etc. However, the sharing of data between drones-to-ground stations (D2GS) encounters significant challenges of authentication and confidentiality. To address these issues, various authentication and key-agreement schemes have been proposed in the literature. Unfortunately, these schemes lack support for aggregate verification of authenticity, leading to increased computational resource consumption at the receiver end. To tackle these challenges, this article contributes a secure and lightweight signcryption scheme with aggregate verification. Subsequently, leveraging this scheme, the article introduces the first efficient and secure data aggregation scheme for IoD-based D2GS communication. This novel approach ensures authentication and confidentiality in a single logical step while supporting aggregate verification of authenticity, thereby minimizing computational resource consumption at the receiver end. A comprehensive discussion on security and performance analysis validates the efficiency and suitability of the proposed design for IoD-based D2GS communication.