SAC-DeV: Secure Access Control for Drone-Assisted Edge Computing in e-VANETs

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are transforming how we manipulate tasks and respond to the challenges by making processes more proficient, safer, economical, and environment friendly. These intelligent UAVs or drones can act as an intermediate node in electric vehicular ad hoc networks (e-VANETs) for relaying weak 5G/beyond 5G communication signals in mountainous terrain. Such aerial assistance could only be feasible if the Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled drones are able to establish a secure channel with vehicles or road side unit (RSU) or edge cloud servers in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) infrastructure. However, drones may be exposed to the physical examination by malicious adversaries that might reveal the vehicle user’s privacy as well as disrupt the network coverage. To effectively assist this role in rural or underdeveloped terrains, this study proposes a secure access control mechanism SAC-DeV for drone-assisted mobile RSU infrastructure to develop a mutually agreed session key after mediating e-vehicular nodes and edge cloud servers. The scheme is immaculately enhanced with physically unclonable function (PUF) circuits in e-vehicles as well as drones to resist physical capture threats. Employing the formal security analysis based on widely known real-or-random (RoR) model, the SEC-DeV is proven to be resilient from several threats. The SEC-DeV exhibits enhanced performance in comparison with comparative studies in terms of computational and communication overheads. Moreover, it supports 24% enhanced security features as compared to preceding studies.