A Cross-Domain Authenticated Key Management Scheme for the Internet of Drones

Abstract

Currently, the pervasive cooperation of a group of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has gained a lot of attention and use for its low price and widespread availability. For drones from different network domains to cooperate with each other, temporary Internet of Drones (IoD) is needed. The collaboration with drones requires frequent identity verification. However, owing to unreliable environment and weak connectivity of the IoD. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are weak in energy, computing, cross-domain and memory resources. It is very difficult to design an efficient and the complete authentication scheme without abundant computing and memory resources. The conventional authentication methods are not suitable for IoD, Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) needs online and high bandwidth resources, at the same time, the construction and operation and maintenance costs of certificate authority (CA) are very high; Identity-Based Cryptograph (IBC) using a lot of operational resources, is a “heavy” algorithm, and in different domains (private key distribution from different Private Key Generator (PKG)) is difficult to authenticate each other. This paper proposes a two-layer lightweight key management scheme based on Unified Multi-domain Identity (UMI), which implement cross-domain authentication, effectively reduce the computing and traffic brought by public key certificate verification which is especially suitable for UAVs network. Finally, through verification, the scheme has better performance and security than other schemes.