Secure Key Agreement Protocol for Multi-Drone Communication

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), or Drone communication, are developing areas of research that can be used in fields of military, hospital or agriculture. Drone communication keeps up associations among drones and a ground station with a satisfactory information rate for sustaining ongoing transmissions. The communication is imparted between one another through RF. This communication is over the air and it should be encrypted. This guarantees an attacker can't comprehend the caught data. The ongoing research areas focus on efficiently encrypting the channel to make it secure and reducing the dependency on GCS for key generation. This paper proposes a key trade protocol for secure drone to drone communication. Normally in a drone communication, the communication between the Ground Control Station(GCS) and the drones are encrypted utilizing the URANUSLink protocol. The drone to drone communication occurs through the ground station which takes a lot of communication time and resources. Additionally, if an immediate drone to drone communication is built up it is significantly decoded or sets aside the need for effective and secure key generation functions. To overcome the previously mentioned issue the proposed protocol defeats the computation and storage issues by utilizing parameters like Drone ID(DID), Mission ID(MID), Timestamp and Nonce alongside hashing capacities for the key age and communication process. The proposed protocol consists of three phases: i)Registration- the new drones are assigned with DID and MID after registering with the GCS ii)Group-Key Generation- the key is generated using hash functions and iii) Communication Establishment- the keys are exchanged and verified before the communication starts. This protocol guarantees forward secrecy, reverse secrecy and insurance from attacks like eavesdropping, spoofing, replay, and physical capture attacks. AVISPA is utilized for the security examination of the protocol.