A secure blockchain-oriented data delivery and collection scheme for 5G-enabled IoD environment

Abstract − There are innumerable ways the Internet of Drones (IoD) technology can impact our society. With the deployment of an airborne network, the IoD can support real-time low-cost delivery of services ranging from military surveillance to a myriad of civilian applications. Nevertheless, the drones employ insecure wireless communication channels to communicate with other entities in the system, inhibiting its induction in sensitive installations if insecure or inefficient Authenticated Key Agreement (AKA) schemes are employed. The blockchain, an open distributed ledger-based technology, is increasingly being adopted to address the security concern as discussed. Recently, Bera et al. presented an efficient blockchain-enabled AKA scheme for data management among various entities in IoD network. However, their scheme does not support anonymity and untraceability for the drones; also, it does not provide resistance to Ground station server impersonation attack, while the protocol has a few redundancies. Later, we proposed an enhanced blockchain-enabled AKA scheme BOD5-IOD to authenticate drones in the system. The BOD5-IOD, other than supporting a robust access control mechanism between drones and GSS, also ensures safe transactions among all entities in the IoD environment. The formal analysis and performance evaluation endorse that our scheme supports security requirements with computational and communication efficiency of 34.4% and 23.3%, respectively.