A robust and efficient authentication and key agreement for UAV-assisted AGS communication in internet of vessels

Abstract

Abstract The UAV-assisted Air-Ground-Sea (AGS) communication, due to its flexibility and extensive coverage, provides robust support for maritime trade and rescue services. However, in the complex network environment of the Internet of Vessels, AGS presents significant security challenges, such as unauthorized access that leads to data breaches. The Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) protocols can verify the identities of legitimate users to ensure secure data access. Nonetheless, the current AKA protocols designed for AGS have security vulnerabilities and face password security risks from eCK adversaries. Thus, they fail to guarantee the secure operation of AKA. This paper designs a robust and efficient authentication and key agreement protocol to preserve the security of authentication, passwords, and session keys, i.e., (Elliptic curve cryptography and Hash-chain)-based AKA, EHAKA. Furthermore, security analysis shows the robustness of the proposed scheme in securing AKA. Performance evaluation indicates that the proposed EHAKA outperforms the SOTA methods in terms of efficiency. Notably, compared with the average computational cost of protocols proposed by Ever, Nyangaresi, Miao, and Khan, the computational cost of EHAKA has been significantly reduced by up to 86.14%.

Keywords

• Internet of vessels
• UAV-assisted AGS communication
• Authentication
• Hash-chain
• eCK adversary