Prasanta Kumar Roy

Drone-to-Drone (D2D) communication has significant applications in many real-time monitoring and surveillance systems. However, communication security and efficiency are crucial for ensuring confidentiality, integrity, and availability in such systems. Physical security of drones is also an essential requirement, as they typically operate in hostile environments. Traditional authentication systems incorporate a trusted third party, known as a ground station, to facilitate secure communication. However, the inclusion of a third party introduces additional delays and increases overall communication latency. Moreover, this approach may lead to availability issues at the ground station if a large number of D2D communications occur simultaneously. This article presents a robust and efficient D2D authentication protocol, called D2DAP, as a countermeasure. It employs a (2, n)-threshold scheme to preserve system security and privacy. The protocol ensures the physical security of drones by integrating a Physical Unclonable Function (PUF). By eliminating third-party involvement, D2DAP significantly reduces communication delay and improves system efficiency during the D2D authentication process. The security and privacy properties of D2DAP are validated using formal, informal, and automated tool-based security analyses. Furthermore, its real-time performance is evaluated on a hardware-based model across various security levels, demonstrating remarkable results.

Privacy and security are the key issues in Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSN) as the wireless sensor nodes are typically deployed in a hostile environment (i.e., in a remote location where minimum or no human intervention is required) and can be easily compromised by an attacker. Several protocols have been proposed to address these issues. However, none of them can fulfill the required privacy and security goals. Additionally, the traditional network architecture presents a performance bottleneck due to the rapidly increasing traffic volume and heterogeneous sensor nodes. Hence, the existing architecture needs to be upgraded accordingly. In this article, we propose a Software-Defined Networking (SDN)-based authentication protocol for real-time data transfer in IWSN, called SDIWSN. SDIWSN puts the management and control functions of the network into a set of logically centralized SDN controllers, thus providing a global view of the network. SDIWSN achieves several privacy and security requirements such as anonymity, unlinkability, mutual authentication, key agreement, forward secrecy and robustness against passive and active attacks. Moreover, SDIWSN provides a simple velocity-based strategy to detect cloning attacks. We validate the privacy and security features of SDIWSN using formal and informal verification. Finally, the efficiency of SDIWSN is measured through a performance-based comparison.