Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, have come in a great diversity of several applications such as military, construction, image and video mapping, medical, search and rescue, parcel delivery, hidden area exploration, oil rigs and power line monitoring, precision farming, wireless communication and aerial surveillance. The drone industry has been getting significant attention as a model of manufacturing, service and delivery convergence, introducing synergy with the coexistence of different emerging domains. UAVs offer implicit peculiarities such as increased airborne time and payload capabilities, swift mobility, and access to remote and disaster areas. Despite these potential features, including extensive variety of usage, high maneuverability, and cost-efficiency, drones are still limited in terms of battery endurance, flight autonomy and constrained flight time to perform persistent missions. Other critical concerns are battery endurance and the weight of drones, which must be kept low. Intuitively it is not suggested to load them with heavy batteries. This study highlights the importance of drones, goals and functionality problems. In this review, a comprehensive study on UAVs, swarms, types, classification, charging, and standardization is presented. In particular, UAV applications, challenges, and security issues are explored in the light of recent research studies and development. Finally, this review identifies the research gap and presents future research directions regarding UAVs.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, once centric to military applications, are presently finding their way in many civilian and commercial applications. If national legislations permit UAVs to operate autonomously, one will see the skies become populated with many small UAVs, each one performing various tasks such as mail and package delivery, traffic monitoring, event filming, surveillance, search and rescue, and other applications. Thus, advancing to multiple small UAVs from a single large UAV has resulted in a new clan of networks known as flying ad-hoc networks (FANETs). Such networks provide reliability, ease of deployment, and relatively low operating costs by offering a robust communication network among the UAVs and base stations (BS). Although FANETs offer many benefits, there also exist a number of challenges that need to be addressed; the most significant of these being the communication one. Therefore, the article aims to provide insights into the key enabling communication technologies through the investigation of data rate, spectrum type, coverage, and latency. Moreover, application scenarios along with the feasibility of key enabling technologies are also examined. Finally, challenges and open research topics are discussed to further hone the research work.

The Internet of Drones (IoD) has recently gained popularity in several military, commercial, and civilian applications due to its unique characteristics, such as high mobility, three-dimensional (3D) movement, and ease of deployment. Drones, on the other hand, communicate over an unencrypted wireless link and have little computational capability in a typical IoD environment, making them exposed to a wide range of cyber-attacks. Security vulnerabilities in IoD systems include man-in-the-middle attacks, impersonation, credential leaking, GPS spoofing, and drone hijacking. To avoid the occurrence of such attacks in IoD networks, we need an extremely powerful security protocol. To address these concerns, we propose a blockchain-based authentication scheme employing Hyperelliptic Curve Cryptography (HECC). The concepts of a blockchain as a Certificate Authority (CA) and a transaction as a certificate discussed in this article are meant to facilitate the use of a blockchain without CAs or a Trusted Third Party (TTP). We offer a security analysis of the proposed scheme, which demonstrates its resistance to known and unknown attacks. The proposed scheme resists replay, man-in-the-middle, device impersonation, malicious device deployment, Denial-of-Service (DoS), and De-synchronization attacks, among others. The security and performance of the proposed scheme are compared to relevant existing schemes, and their performance is shown to be better in terms of security attributes as well as computation and communication costs than existing competitive schemes. The total computation cost of the proposed scheme is 40.479 ms, which is 37.49% and 49.79% of the two comparable schemes. This shows that the proposed scheme is better suited to the IoD environment than existing competitive schemes.

The integration of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the telecare medical information system (TMIS) enables patients to receive timely and convenient healthcare services regardless of their location or time zone. Since the Internet serves as the key hub for connection and data sharing, its open nature presents security and privacy concerns and should be considered when integrating this technology into the current global healthcare system. Cybercriminals target the TMIS because it holds a lot of sensitive patient data, including medical records, personal information, and financial information. As a result, when developing a trustworthy TMIS, strict security procedures are required to deal with these concerns. Several researchers have proposed smart card-based mutual authentication methods to prevent such security attacks, indicating that this will be the preferred method for TMIS security with the IoT. In the existing literature, such methods are typically developed using computationally expensive procedures, such as bilinear pairing, elliptic curve operations, etc., which are unsuitable for biomedical devices with limited resources. Using the concept of hyperelliptic curve cryptography (HECC), we propose a new solution: a smart card-based two-factor mutual authentication scheme. In this new scheme, HECC’s finest properties, such as compact parameters and key sizes, are utilized to enhance the real-time performance of an IoT-based TMIS system. The results of a security analysis indicate that the newly contributed scheme is resistant to a wide variety of cryptographic attacks. A comparison of computation and communication costs demonstrates that the proposed scheme is more cost-effective than existing schemes.

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have become an essential part of the intelligent transportation system because they provide secure communication among vehicles, enhance vehicle safety, and improve the driving experience. However, due to the openness and vulnerability of wireless networks, the participating vehicles in a VANET system are prone to a variety of cyberattacks. To secure the privacy of vehicles and assure the authenticity, integrity, and nonrepudiation of messages, numerous signature schemes have been employed in the literature on VANETs. The majority of these solutions, however, are either not fully secured or entail high computational costs. To address the above issues and to enable secure communication between the vehicle and the roadside unit (RSU), we propose a certificateless aggregate signature (CLAS) scheme based on hyperelliptic curve cryptography (HECC). This scheme enables participating vehicles to share their identities with trusted authorities via an open wireless channel without revealing their identities to unauthorized participants. Another advantage of this approach is its capacity to release the partial private key to participating devices via an open wireless channel while keeping its identity secret from any other third parties. A provable security analysis through the random oracle model (ROM), which relies on the hyperelliptic curve discrete logarithm problem, is performed, and we have proven that the proposed scheme is unforgeable against Type 1 ($FG{R}_1$) and Type 2 ($FG{R}_2$) forgers. The proposed scheme is compared with relevant schemes in terms of computational cost and communication overhead, and the results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is more efficient than the existing schemes in maintaining high-security levels.

Thanks to the widespread availability of Fifth Generation (5G) wireless connectivity, it is now possible to provide preventative or proactive healthcare services from any location and at any time. As a result of this technological improvement, Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have emerged as a new study of research in the field of healthcare in recent years. WBANs, on the one hand, intend to gather and monitor data from the human body and its surroundings; on the other hand, biomedical devices and sensors interact through an open wireless channel, making them exposed to a range of cyber threats. However, WBANs are a heterogeneous-based system; heterogeneous cryptography is necessary, in which the transmitter and receiver can employ different types of public key cryptography. This article proposes an improved and efficient heterogeneous authentication scheme with a conditional privacy-preserving strategy that provides secure communication in WBANs. In the proposed scheme, we employed certificateless cryptography on the client side and Identity-Based Cryptography on the receiver side. The proposed scheme employs Hyperelliptic Curve Cryptography (HECC), a more advanced variation of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). HECC achieves the same level of security with a smaller key size and a more efficient approach than its counterpart methods. The proposed scheme not only meets the security and privacy standards of WBANs but also enhances efficiency in terms of computation and communication costs, according to the findings of the security and performance analysis.