Abstract
The revolutionary advancement in the capabilities of hardware tools, software packages, and communication techniques gave rise to the Internet of Things-supported drone networks (IoD), thereby enabling smooth communication among devices and applications, and impacting drastically the various aspects of human lives. However, with the increasing sophistication in the infrastructure of IoD, new security threats arise that require novel algorithms and schemes as solutions. To this end, several schemes have recently been proposed. However, some schemes cannot perfectly address the novel security aspects associated with IoD environments, while others cannot provide computational or communication efficiency. Motivated by these research gaps in the existing literature, we leverage elliptic curve cryptography along with symmetric encryption and hash function, and propose a novel and robust user authentication mechanism for the IoD, called RUAM-IoD. We validate the security of the established SK formally through the random oracle model. Similarly, we provide informal security analysis to demonstrate the security capabilities of RUAM-IoD against different pernicious security attacks. Likewise, we establish a comparison of the RUAM-IoD with several state-of-the-art authentication schemes to show that RUAM-IoD acquires less storage, communication, and computational cost.