Taxonomy, Open Challenges, and Future Directions for Authentication Techniques in Internet of Drones (IoD)

Recently, Internet of Drones (IoD) applications have grown in various fields, including the military, healthcare, smart agriculture, and traffic monitoring. Drones are equipped with computation resources, communication units, and embedded systems that enable them to sense, collect, and transmit data in real time through public communication channels. However, this fact introduces a risk of attacks on data transmitted over unsecured public channels. Addressing several security threats is crucial to ensuring the secure operation of IoD networks. Robust authentication protocols play a vital role in establishing secure processes in the IoD environment. However, designing efficient and lightweight authentication solutions is a complex task due to the unique characteristics of the IoD and the limitations of drones in terms of their communication and computational capabilities. There is a need to review the role of authentication processes in controlling security threats in the IoD due to the increasing complexity and frequency of security breaches. This review will present the main challenges and future directions for authentication schemes in the IoD and provide a framework for relevant existing schemes to facilitate future research into the IoD. Therefore, in this paper, we conduct a literature review to highlight the contributions several studies have made to this domain of the IoD. This study reviews several existing methods for authenticating entities in the IoD environment. Moreover, this study discusses security requirements and highlights several challenges encountered with the authentication schemes used in the IoD. The findings of this paper suggest future directions for research to consider in order for this domain to continue to evolve.