Abstract
Drones have limited computing and storage resources, which makes them unable to perform complex tactical tasks; drones working in clusters can be employed for such complex tactical task completion. But, the synergy between these drones working in clusters is mandatory. Otherwise, the adversary can easily target them, disturb their routine work, and even disturb the whole system. Only a robust and lightweight authentication protocol can handle both information fusion and collaboration and coordination of drones working in clusters efficiently and effectively and is one of the essential components of the Internet of Drones (IoD) environment as it is deployed for quick and intelligent decisions. In this regard, the already available security mechanisms for IoD deployment drones have either design flaws or failed to provide security against session key disclosure, spoofing, man in the middle (MITM), and denial of service (DoS) attacks. Therefore, this article presents a protocol based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), one-way hash, concatenation, and exclusive-OR (XOR) operations to establish a secure communication session among drones which makes them a powerful system to perform complex tactical tasks and information fusion intelligently. The security analysis of the proposed protocol has formally been scrutinized via BAN logic and ProVerif and informally via realistic discussion and illustrations. The results obtained from the analysis sections demonstrate that the proposed protocol is robust in security and is 63.87% more efficient in terms of communication cost compared to its competitors, and 66.46% better in terms of computational cost.