SaTC: CORE: Small: Developing Pseudonymous Certificate Based Authentication Scheme for Application Scheme for Application-Aware and Cross-Domain IoD Communications

In recent years drone technology has become increasingly common as seen by a spike in market growth for the drone industry. In order to enable heterogeneous drones to autonomously connect with the existing Internet architecture, the Internet of Drones (IoD) paradigm has been created to generate a network of interconnections among drones as well as zone service providers. As the IoD paradigm has been widely adopted in various civilian and military application domains, the IoD systems are being targeted by adversaries to cause damage to properties, people, and cyberspace. This project seeks to develop a security mechanism which is applicable and suitable for multi-tasking and large-scale IoD applications with strong privacy preservation. The proposed security mechanism can be easily integrated with the existing IoD paradigm and enable IoD systems to achieve the desired levels of security and privacy while meeting the practical requirements of IoD applications. These outcomes are expected to have a positive impact on the construction of secure and efficient aerial communication framework in the future. Currently, seniors have limited cybersecurity awareness, and women and Native Americans remain underrepresented in cybersecurity education/workforce. The effort also includes a novel effort to increase seniors’ cybersecurity awareness, and several outreach activities for broadening participation in computing and cybersecurity. The overall objective of this project is to develop a novel certificate-based authentication scheme that enables pseudonymous, application-aware, and cross-domain IoD communications. To attain the overall objective, this project will design a certificate issuing protocol, create a certificate conversion protocol, and produce a certificate revocation protocol. The proposed certificate-based authentication scheme advances the state of the art by supporting multi-tasking and large-scale IoD applications with strong privacy preservation. The proposed scheme will be evaluated via security analysis and verification, event-driven network simulation, and real-world experiments. Overall, the outcomes of this project will become the foundation for building a secure and efficient aerial communication framework, and provide security, privacy, and practical design considerations for other open and interoperable platforms. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.