ILAGKDF-IoD: An Intelligent Lightweight Authentication and Group Key Distribution Framework for Covert Communications in Next-Generation Internet of Drones Networks

The Internet of Drones (IoD) is an emerging technology for next-generation intelligent wireless networks, enabling applications such as smart-city surveillance, intelligent transportation, environmental monitoring, disaster management, and autonomous delivery. However, the highly dynamic and resource-constrained nature of IoD networks, together with the open broadcast characteristics of wireless communication, makes secure and privacy-preserving authentication challenging. In particular, identity disclosure, replay, impersonation, message modification, passive eavesdropping, and unauthorized access can compromise trusted communication among drones, Ground Station Servers (GSSs), Network Administrators (NAs), and Mobile Users (MUs). To address these challenges, this paper proposes an Intelligent Lightweight Authentication and Group Key Distribution Framework for Covert Communications in Next-Generation Internet of Drones Networks (ILAGKDF-IoD). The proposed scheme integrates lightweight hash/HMAC and bitwise XOR operations with dynamic group-key distribution to provide efficient authentication, anonymous identity management, and secure group communication while reducing the computational cost on resource-constrained drones. The security of ILAGKDF-IoD is evaluated through formal analysis under the Random Oracle Model (ROM) and comprehensive informal security analysis. The results demonstrate resistance to replay, impersonation, message modification, identity-disclosure, and passive-eavesdropping attacks, while providing conditional anonymity, traceability, unlinkability, forward secrecy, and backward secrecy. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme significantly reduces computational cost by 28.57%-84.42% compared with the considered existing authentication schemes, demonstrating its computational efficiency and suitability for dynamic IoD environments. It provides a lightweight authentication and group-key management foundation for secure and privacy-preserving communications in intelligent covert-communication-enabled 5G/B5G/6G IoD networks.