A Symmetric Key and Elliptic Curve Cryptography-Based Protocol for Message Encryption in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Unmanned aerial vehicles have found applications in fields such as environmental monitoring and the military. Although collected data some of these application domains are sensitive, public channels deployed during communication process. Therefore, many protocols been presented to preserve confidentiality integrity exchanged messages. However, numerous security performance challenges noted majority protocols. In this paper, an elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) symmetric key-based protocol is presented. The choice ECC was informed by its relatively shorter key sizes compared other asymmetric encryption algorithms Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) algorithm. Security analysis showed that provides mutual authentication, session agreement, untraceability, anonymity, forward secrecy, backward biometric privacy. addition, it robust against smart card loss, password guessing, known secret temporary information (KSSTI), privileged insider, side-channeling, impersonation, denial-of-service (DoS), man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks. comparative evaluation has low computation, storage, complexities.