Open Access

ARTICLE

A Secure Key Agreement Scheme for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles-Based Crowd Monitoring System

Bander Alzahrani¹, Ahmed Barnawi¹, Azeem Irshad², Areej Alhothali¹, Reem Alotaibi¹, Muhammad Shafiq^3,*

1 Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
2 Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, International Islamic University Islamabad, Pakistan
3 Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Yeungnam University, Gyeongsan, 38541, Korea

* Corresponding Author: Muhammad Shafiq. Email:

Computers, Materials & Continua 2022, 70(3), 6141-6158. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2022.020774

Received 07 June 2021; Accepted 16 August 2021; Issue published 11 October 2021

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have recently attracted widespread attention in civil and commercial applications. For example, UAVs (or drone) technology is increasingly used in crowd monitoring solutions due to its wider air footprint and the ability to capture data in real time. However, due to the open atmosphere, drones can easily be lost or captured by attackers when reporting information to the crowd management center. In addition, the attackers may initiate malicious detection to disrupt the crowd-sensing communication network. Therefore, security and privacy are one of the most significant challenges faced by drones or the Internet of Drones (IoD) that supports the Internet of Things (IoT). In the literature, we can find some authenticated key agreement (AKA) schemes to protect access control between entities involved in the IoD environment. However, the AKA scheme involves many vulnerabilities in terms of security and privacy. In this paper, we propose an enhanced AKA solution for crowd monitoring applications that require secure communication between drones and controlling entities. Our scheme supports key security features, including anti-forgery attacks, and confirms user privacy. The security characteristics of our scheme are analyzed by NS2 simulation and verified by a random oracle model. Our simulation results and proofs show that the proposed scheme sufficiently guarantees the security of crowd-aware communication.

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Citations