With the increasing prevalence of drones, guaranteeing their authentication and secure communication has become paramount in drone networks to mitigate unauthorized access and malicious attacks. Cross-domain authentication is crucial in the context of the Internet of Drones (IoD) for safely verifying and establishing trust between diverse drones and their respective control stations, which may belong to different regions or organizations. Effectively accessing resources or services in another domain while maintaining security and efficiency poses a significant challenge. Conventional authentication mechanisms relying on challenging problems like discrete logarithm and integer factorization might not be sufficient to guarantee the security and effectiveness of drone-based systems in the post-quantum era. To address this, we propose a distributed post-quantum cryptography and Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) based cross-domain authentication protocol for IoD. Key contributions of this work include the elimination of secret key storage on drones, mutual authentication, emphasis on hardware security, incorporation of post-quantum security measures, efficient cross-domain authentication and resilience against cyber attacks such as eavesdropping, impersonation, replay attack, untraceability, and PUF-modeling attack. The performance of the proposed protocol is assessed utilizing metrics like processing time, communication cost and storage utilization. In operations associated to the blockchain ledger, variables such as latency, throughput, CPU utilization, and memory utilization are also examined. The protocol shows a reduced computation time and zero sensitive data storage in drone memory, despite a slightly higher communication cost that is manageable with 5G-enabled drones. Comparative analysis against existing solutions in the domain highlights the superior security of the proposed protocol, positioning it as a promising solution for the evolving quantum landscape.

中文翻译：

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一种基于后量子安全PUF的无人机互联网跨域认证机制


随着无人机的日益普及，保证无人机的身份验证和安全通信已成为无人机网络中减少未经授权的访问和恶意攻击的首要任务。在无人机互联网 (IoD) 背景下，跨域身份验证对于安全验证和建立不同无人机及其各自控制站（可能属于不同区域或组织）之间的信任至关重要。在保持安全性和效率的同时有效访问另一个域中的资源或服务是一项重大挑战。依赖于离散对数和整数分解等挑战性问题的传统身份验证机制可能不足以保证后量子时代基于无人机的系统的安全性和有效性。为了解决这个问题，我们提出了一种基于分布式后量子密码学和物理不可克隆功能（PUF）的 IoD 跨域身份验证协议。这项工作的主要贡献包括消除无人机上的密钥存储、相互身份验证、强调硬件安全、纳入后量子安全措施、高效的跨域身份验证以及针对窃听、冒充、重放攻击等网络攻击的弹性。不可追踪性和 PUF 建模攻击。使用处理时间、通信成本和存储利用率等指标来评估所提出的协议的性能。在与区块链账本相关的操作中，还会检查延迟、吞吐量、CPU 利用率和内存利用率等变量。 尽管通信成本略高，但支持 5G 的无人机可以管理，但该协议显示了计算时间的缩短和无人机内存中的零敏感数据存储。与该领域现有解决方案的比较分析突出了所提出的协议的卓越安全性，将其定位为不断发展的量子领域的一个有前途的解决方案。