Designing secure blockchain-based access control scheme in IoT-enabled Internet of Drones deployment

In recent years, the Internet of Drones (IoD) has emerged as an important research topic in the academy and industry because it has several potential applications ranging from the civilian to military. In IoD environment, several drones, called Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), are deployed in different flying zones that communicate each other to exchange crucial information, and then the information are collected by the Ground Station Server (GSS). All the drones and the GSS are registered with a central trusted authority, Control Room (CR) prior to their deployment. Since the drones and the GSS communicate over open channel (e.g., wireless medium), there are security and privacy issues in the IoD environment. To handle such issues, in this paper we introduce a blockchain-based access control scheme in the IoD environment that allows secure communication among the drones, and also among the drones and the GSS. Secure data gathered by the GSS form transactions, and those transactions are made into the blocks. The blocks are finally added in the blockchain by the cloud servers connected with the GSS via the Ripple Protocol Consensus Algorithm (RPCA) in a peer-to-peer cloud server network. Once the blocks are added into the blockchain, the transactions containing in the blocks cannot be altered, modified or even removed. We provide all sorts of security analysis including formal security under the random oracle model, informal security and simulation-based formal security verification to assure that the proposed scheme can resist various potential attacks with high probability needed in an IoD environment. In addition, a meticulous comparative analysis among the proposed scheme and other closely related existing schemes shows that our scheme offers more functionality attributes and better security, and also low communication and computation costs as compared to other schemes.