Drones Don’t Trust Blindly: Quantum-Secure AKE Protocol for IoD-Enabled FANETs

The convergence of autonomous aerial systems and networking technologies has given rise to the Internet of Drones (IoD) as a compelling paradigm, gaining significant attention from academia and industry stakeholders. Drones often operate in swarm formations to collaboratively achieve autonomous coordination and aerial intelligence, thereby forming a Flying Ad Hoc Network (FANET). However, the persistent vulnerability remains in the insecure communication link, exposing the network to eavesdropping and unauthorized access. Addressing such shortcomings necessitates a robust Authentication and Key Exchange (AKE) protocol. Therefore, we have designed a quantum secure AKE protocol integrating NIST-proven quantum secure primitives, including ML-DSA, symmetric AES, and hash functions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first AKE protocol that leverages a quantum secure signature scheme for securing IoD-enabled FANET applications. The designed protocol incorporates hardware-specific fingerprinting integrated with a noise tolerance mechanism to eliminate the risk of unauthorized device tampering. The use of re-synchronization and robust security measures for credential management further enhances its resilience against desynchronization and stolen attacks. The findings of performance evaluation exhibit the superiority of the designed protocol over the prevalent AKE protocols, with a remarkable reduction of 67.62% in computation cost while achieving a 50% improvement in overall security. Finally, implementing a complete authentication cycle using PIX32 and Pixhawk 6C drones sets a new benchmark as a practical validation of the designed AKE protocol within a real-world IoD testbed.