Authentication and Delegation for Operating a Multi-Drone System

As the era of IoT comes, drones are in the spotlight as a mobile medium of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and services. However, drones appear to be vulnerable to physical capture attacks since they usually operate far from operators. If a drone is illegally captured, some important data will be exposed to the attacker. In this paper, we propose a saveless-based key management and delegation system for a multi-drone control system. The proposed system enables a multi-drone control system to highly resist physical capture by minimizing exposure of confidential data. In addition, when the drone leaves the formation for performing another mission or by a natural environment, the system can allow the drone to securely re-participate in the formation with the help of the ground control station (GCS) when it comes back. The analysis result shows that the proposed system can reduce storage space usage and require less computational overhead. From the result, we expect that the system can guarantee the resistance of physical capture and secure key management to the drones as well as many mobile IoT devices.