Evolutionary study of distributed authentication protocols and its integration to UAV-assisted FANET

An authentication protocol is one of the fundamental security mechanisms in distributed systems to ensure the integrity and trust level of the nodes during communication. Since message passing is the only way of communication among the systems covered under such an environment, it becomes a necessary condition to check the valid authenticity of the nodes before sending any sensitive information. Such kind of communication between any homogeneous and heterogenous entities (also principals) like, clients, servers, processes etc., must be secure by differentiating the actual legitimate node and intruder node. This process seems to be complex due to the absence of any centralized authority. Nowadays, unmanned aerial vehicle (also, drone)-based network (flying ad hoc network) is in trend due to their versatile dynamic behavior and high applicability region in real-time applications and can be viewed as a special form of distributed network with flying objects. This technology itself is highly capable of carrying any sensitive information from one location to another and also requires much attention for node authentication during the information exchange, which is limited in the existing literature. Hence through our presented work, we studied various distributed authentication protocols and analyzed their possible exposure to flying ad hoc networks. This proposed art-of-study helps to build a sequential relationship to evolve such authentication protocols and opens a unique dimension for flying networks with secure data transfer using these protocols.