Blockchain-based cross-domain authentication in a multi-domain Internet of drones environment

As a new paradigm, the Internet of drones (IoD) is making the future easy with its flexibility and wide range of applications. However, these drones are prone to security attacks during communication because of this flexibility. The traditional authentication mechanism uses a centralized server which is a single point of failure to its network and a performance bottleneck. Also, privacy-preserving mechanisms involving a single authority are vulnerable to identity attacks if compromised. Moreover, cross-domain authentication schemes are getting more costly as the security requirements increase. So, this work proposes a blockchain-based cross-domain authentication scheme to make drone communication more secure and efficient. In this work, an elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA) based message authentication scheme and a session key generation scheme are modeled. A two-phase pseudonym generation procedure is used to secure the identity of the drones. Hyperledger Fabric is used to implement the blockchain network, and the analysis is done using Hyperledger Caliper. Blockchain analysis through caliper shows the blockchain’s performance for various loads of transactions. Security analysis of the proposed scheme shows that the scheme is secure from various security attacks. The performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme is more lightweight and efficient than most similar authentication schemes.