BioUAV: blockchain-envisioned framework for digital identification to secure access in next-generation UAVs

Modern cloud-based UAV communications authenticate user identity through hash-based biometric authentication schemes, but are limited in scope due to high-end processing and user template matching delays, coupled with latency and storage overheads. Motivated from the aforementioned discussions, the paper proposes a BC- envisioned identity framework to secure next-generation UAV communication. In BioUAV, a dual layer of security is exploited. In the first layer, user identity registration to UAVs are done in BC through input random oracles, that generates diffusion in biometric values. The values are then fed to a transformation function that generates biocodes as second layer of authentication. Based on generated biocodes values, smart contracts (SC) are executed for transaction verification through encrypted wallets with user public/private pairs. For 80 biohashes, BioUAV has an overall latency of 22.5 milliseconds (ms), compared to 33.78 ms for conventional matching schemes. The framework has a accuracy of 98.37% under receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, with an attack probability of less than 0.5 at a proposed low performance indicator (PI) of 0.48. For security evaluation, the computation cost (CC) of BioUAV is 144.58 ms, and communication cost (CCM) is 123 bytes, that indicates the viability of the proposed framework against conventional approaches.