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The rise of smart cities and the increasing demand for drones has sparked considerable interest in the Internet of Drones (IoD) within the realms of academia and industry. IoD presents a multitude of advantages in smart city settings, facilitating services like traffic monitoring, environmental surveillance, and disaster management by harnessing the potential of IoT and Flying Ad-Hoc Networks (FANET) infrastructures. However, the transmission of sensitive messages between drones in IoD-based smart cities is disseminated over insecure channels, leaving them exposed to security vulnerabilities. Furthermore, drones operating in IoD architectures are prone to physical capture attacks as they operate in unattended environments with minimal human intervention. Moreover, the limited resources of drones pose challenges to the practicality of employing computationally intensive cryptographic methods. In response to these challenges, we introduce PAF-IoD, an authentication framework that prioritizes security and efficiency. PAF-IoD leverages physical unclonable functions (PUFs) and the AEGIS authenticated encryption scheme to guarantee trustworthy and secure communication between users and drones in smart cities. In terms of security validation, we perform both random and real model-based formal analyses. Furthermore, we employ the Scyther tool to ensure the resilience of PAF-IoD against different security vulnerabilities. Additionally, an informal analysis is conducted to demonstrate the resilience of PAF-IoD against various attacks. By introducing PAF-IoD, we offer a secure solution that addresses vulnerabilities and resource limitations associated with drone communication. The proposed framework guarantees the integrity and confidentiality of data while optimizing computational and communication resources, thereby enabling reliable and effective IoD operations in smart cities.

The Internet of Things (IoT) devices are becoming increasingly integral to daily life, with cloud computing platforms serving as essential hubs for managing and processing the vast data generated by distributed IoT devices and sensors. The advent of 6G-powered cloud services facilitates applications such as augmented reality, virtual reality, autonomous driving, and healthcare, all of which require rapid data processing. Mobile edge computing (MEC) extends cloud capabilities to the network’s edge, enabling large-scale, real-time data processing. However, this transition introduces security challenges due to the open nature of MEC infrastructures, which increases the risk of data breaches and privacy violations. To address these challenges, RAAF-MEC is proposed as an innovative authentication framework designed specifically for IoT-enabled MEC environments. The framework incorporates hash functions, PUF, ECC, and GIFT-COFB. GIFT-COFB, a lightweight encryption mechanism, and NIST finalist, ensures data authenticity and integrity. PUF technology, integrated on the MEC server side, dynamically derives secret keys, mitigating the risk of privileged insider attacks by eliminating the need to store keys in the MEC server’s database. This approach enhances security by preventing unauthorized access to sensitive key material. RAAF-MEC also supports single sign-on for seamless access across MEC servers. The effectiveness of RAAF-MEC has been validated through comprehensive formal and informal security assessments, as well as performance evaluations against existing authentication frameworks. Our results show that RAAF-MEC reduces computational costs by 27.3% to 52.12% and communication costs by 69.44% to 75%, while significantly enhancing security features.