IoD-Crypt: A Lightweight Cryptographic Framework for Internet of Drones

Abstract: Internet of Drones (IoD) is expected to play a central role in many civilian and military applications, that require sensitive and mission-critical information to be processed. It is therefore vital to ensure the security and privacy of IoD. However, unlike traditional networks, IoD has a broader attack surface and is highly energy-constrained, which hinder the direct adoption of standard cryptographic protocols for IoD. We propose an energy-efficient cryptographic framework (namely IoD-Crypt), which can potentially meet the requirements of battery-limited IoD. Specifically, IoD-Crypt utilizes special precomputation techniques and self-certified primitives to gain significant computation and communication efficiency over the standard public key cryptography (PKC) suites. Our integrations and optimizations are broadly applicable to key exchange, digital signature and public key encryption schemes that encompass generic applications of PKC in IoD. We prove that IoD-Crypt is secure in the random oracle model. We fully implemented IoD-Crypt on two common drone processors, namely 8-bit AVR and 32-bit ARM, and conducted an in-depth energy analysis. Our experiments (on both platforms) showed that IoD-Crypt offers up to 48x less energy consumption compared to standard techniques. We have open-sourced our implementations for wide adoption and public testing purposes.