In this paper, the authors propose a physical-layer challenge–response authentication (CR-PLA) protocol designed specifically for drone communication. Instead of relying on cryptographic keys, the receiver drone (Bob) authenticates the sender by exploiting location-dependent wireless channel attenuation, influenced by path loss and shadowing. By randomly selecting target attenuation values and moving to corresponding spatial positions, Bob generates unpredictable challenges that an attacker cannot anticipate.
The study also incorporates drone mobility into the security design, modeling energy consumption and introducing three movement-optimization strategies: a purely greedy approach, an optimal Bellman iterative solution, and a lightweight heuristic based on local attenuation variance. Analytical expressions for false alarm and missed detection probabilities are derived, and simulation results confirm both the security effectiveness of CR-PLA and the substantial long-term energy savings achieved by the optimized policies. These findings highlight CR-PLA as a viable and energy-aware authentication method for future drone and IoD systems.
Energy-Based Optimization od Physical-Layer Challange-Response Authentication with Drones