Quantum-Safe Secure and Authorized Communication Protocol for Internet of Drones

Remotely-Controlled Aerial Vehicles (RCAV), popularly known as drones, have gained wide popularity in several applications from military to civilian due to the usage of sensors, actuators, and processors with wireless connectivity for data collection and processing. However, data security and authentication are still challenging as sensitive data is collected and shared in RCAV using an open channel, i.e., the Internet. The existing security of Internet-of-Drones (IoD) communication mainly depends on the hardness of discrete logarithms and factorization problems. However, due to Shor's algorithm, both authorized and secure transmissions are challenging in the presence of highly scalable quantum computers. To mitigate the aforementioned issues and challenges, in this article, we propose an authorized and secure communication scheme for IoD based on Ring Learning With Error (RLWE) problem on lattices, which have the potential to sustain low computation and quantum attacks. The proposed scheme supports mutual authentication and has an efficient session establishment. The evaluation results show that the proposed scheme has superior performance as compared to the existing state-of-the-art solutions on benchmark data sets using various evaluation metrics.