The Internet-of-drones (IoD) environment is a layered network control architecture designed to maintain, coordinate, access, and control drones (or Unmanned Aerial vehicles UAVs) and facilitate drones' navigation services. The main entities in IoD are drones, ground station, and external user. Before operationalizing a drone in IoD, a control infrastructure is mandatory for securing its open network channel (Flying Ad Hoc Networks FANETs). An attacker can easily capture data from the available network channel and use it for their own purpose. Its protection is challenging, as it guarantees message integrity, non-repudiation, authenticity, and authorization amongst all the participants. Incredibly, without a robust authentication protocol, the task is sensitive and challenging one to solve. This research focus on the security of the communication path between drone and ground station and solving the noted vulnerabilities like stolen-verifier, privileged-insider attacks, and outdated-data-transmission/design flaws often reported in the current authentication protocols for IoD. We proposed a hash message authentication code/secure hash algorithmic (HMACSHA1) based robust, improved and lightweight authentication protocol for securing IoD. Its security has been verified formally using Random Oracle Model (ROM), ProVerif2.02 and informally using assumptions and pragmatic illustration. The performance evaluation proved that the proposed protocol is lightweight compared to prior protocols and recommended for implementation in the real-world IoD environment.

With the rapid miniaturization in sensor technology, ruddervator, arduino, and multi-rotor system, drone technology has fascinated researchers in the field of network security. It is of critical significance given the advancement in modern strategic narratives. This has special relevance to drone-related operations. This technology can be controlled remotely by an invisible yet credible operator sitting to a powerful intelligence computer system (PICS) or an airborne control and command platform (AC2P). The two types of drones (reconnaissance and attacking) can communicate with each other and with the PICS or AC2P through wireless network channels referred to as Flying Ad Hoc Network or Unmanned Aerial Vehicular Network (FANET or UAVN). This mode of communication is not without some inconvenience. For instance, when the line of sight is broken, communication is mainly carried out through satellite using GPS (Global Positioning System) signals. Both GPS and UAVN/FANET use open network channels for data broadcasting, which are exposed to several threats, thus making security risky and challenging. This risk is specifically eminent in monitoring data transmission traffic, espionage, troop movement, border surveillance, searching, and warfare battlefield phenomenon, etc. This issue of security risk can be minimized conspicuously by developing a robust authentication scheme for IoD deployment military drones. Therefore, this research illustrates the designing of two separate protocols based on the aggregate signature, identity, pairing cryptography, and Computational Diffie-Hellman Problem (CDHP) to guarantee data integrity, authorization, and confidentiality among drones and AC2P/PICS. More importantly, the outdated data transmission flaw has also been tackled, which is of obvious concern to the past designed protocols. The security of the proposed designs is formally verified using a random oracle model (ROM), a real-or-random (ROR) model, and by informally using pragmatic illustration and mathematical lemmas. Nonetheless, the performance analysis section will be executed using the algorithmic big-O notation. The results show that these protocols are verifiably protected in the ROM and ROR model using the CDHP.

Offshore software development outsourcing (OSDO) is a modern business strategy for producing high-quality software at a low cost. The OSDO refers to the practice of contracting to an offshore (extrinsic) organization to perform some or all software development work of a product. For the benefit of the OSDO vendors, this paper aims to develop a “communication and coordination challenges mitigation model” (CCCMM) that provides solutions for unambiguously defined communication and coordination processes in global software development (GSD) environment. Our proposed model is based on the fuzzy multi-attribute decision-making (FMADM) approach incorporating the capability of group decision-making. The FMADM approach is used both in the ranking of survey and assessment of case studies. First, the authors undertook a systematic literature review (SLR) that identified all cited challenges from a set of 101 articles. We identified 18 problem areas faced by the GSD vendors in OSDO relationships. Of these, six were ranked as critical. For the purpose of identifying corrective interventions, a second SLR was conducted that revealed 75 remedial measures extracted from 63 chosen articles. To validate our SLR findings, we surveyed 42 outsourcing experts from six countries. We also categorized six critical challenges and 75 corrective practices into four mitigation levels based on CMMI, SOVRM, and SOPM. In addition, two case studies were conducted to evaluate CCCMM outcomes in OSDO companies. The assessment results of the first case study do not recommend Company-A for the successful implementation of level-2 of the CCCMM, so Company-A stands at level-1. We have observed from the second case study that Company-B has implemented all the critical challenges of the level-2 only; therefore, Company-B is at level-2 “success” of the proposed assessment model.

Drones are of different shapes, sizes, characteristics, and configurations. It can be classified for the purpose of its deployment, either in the civilian or military domain. The earliest usage of drones was totally for military purposes, but manufacturers promptly tested it for civilian fields like border surveillance, disaster relief, pipeline inspection, and rescue. Drone manufacturing, equipment installation, power supply, multi-rotor system, and embedded sensors are not the pressing issues for researchers of drone technologies. What is required is to utilize a drone for a complex operation and ensure secured data broadcasting among drones with the ground control station via a self-organized, resourceless, and infrastructureless network (Flying Ad Hoc Networks (FANETs)). These operations are no less important in areas like an emergency, search and rescue operations, border surveillance, and physical phenomenon sensing for the end-user. However, it is not without some challenges for the researchers keeping in view the threats these operations are exposed to concerning security issues and challenges. To overcome these challenges, the researchers have to strive towards a secured drone operation by developing a robust and lightweight key agreement protocol for IoD deployment civilian drones. Consequently, the researchers in this study have attempted to design a key agreement scheme for the IoD deployment of civilian drones. The security of the proposed key agreement scheme has been verified by ProVerif2.02 and Real-Or-Random (ROR) model, while its performance scenario has been tackled by considering storage, computation, and communication overheads analysis. In comparing the proposed framework with prior protocols, it has been demonstrated that the scheme is quite efficient and may be recommended for operations in a given IoD environment.

Biosensor is a means to transmit some physical phenomena, like body temperature, pulse, respiratory rate, electroencephalogram (EEG), electrocardiogram (ECG), and blood pressure. Such transmission is performed via Wireless Medical Sensor Network (WMSN) while diagnosing patients remotely through Internet-of-Medical-Things (IoMT). The sensitive data transmitted through WMSN from IoMT over an insecure channel is vulnerable to several threats and needs proper attention to be secured from adversaries. In contrast to addressing the security of all associated entities involving patient monitoring in the healthcare system or ensuring the integrity, authorization, and nonrepudiation of information over the communication line, no one can guarantee its security without a robust authentication protocol. Therefore, we have proposed a lightweight and robust authentication scheme for the network-enabled healthcare devices (IoMT) that mitigate all the identified weaknesses posed in the recent literature. The proposed protocol’s security has been analyzed formally using BAN logic and ProVerif2.02 and informally using pragmatic illustration. Simultaneously, at the end of the paper, the performance analysis result shows a delicate balance of security with performance that is often missing in the current protocols.