A Construction of Secure and Efficient Authenticated Key Exchange Protocol for Deploying Internet of Drones in Smart City

The concept of a smart city is increasing because of the demand for intelligent drones. So, the Internet of Drones came into picture, providing several benefits/services for daily life. Services that IoD offers are monitoring, FANET (Flying Ad-Hoc Networks), management of any infrastructure, and IoT (Internet of Things). These services can be deployed in the smart city environment. Still, communication among drones is a significant concern. For communicating, drones use the insecure channel, and there is a risk of security threats while sending critical information. They are also prone to physical capture attacks because of their usage in an environment devoid of human beings. Regarding communication and computation, drones are resource constrained, so it is not feasible to implement public key cryptography because it requires more power to perform those actions. A recent protocol for the internet of drones is also analyzed in this article. Therefore, this article presents a lightweight authentication protocol that is reliable to the users and meets their demands. The performance analysis ensures the efficiency of the proposed protocol.