D2VAuth: Efficient Drone-to-Vehicle Authentication Using Blockchain and Hyperelliptic Curve Cryptography

Integrating consumer-grade drones into the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) can extend coverage and enable low-latency services, but it also introduces authentication challenges due to high mobility, intermittent connectivity, resource constraints, and the reliance on centralized trusted authorities, which increases exposure to physical compromise and sophisticated attacks. Existing drone-assisted IoV authentication schemes are often computationally expensive, insufficiently scalable, or fragile under disconnections. To address these gaps, we propose drone-to-vehicle authentication (D2VAuth), a lightweight drone-to-vehicle authentication framework that combines Hyperelliptic Curve Cryptography (HECC) for energy-efficient key establishment with a permissioned blockchain using Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) for decentralized trust management, auditability, and revocation. D2VAuth supports offline and delayed authentication and resists common attacks, including Sybil, replay, cloning, Man-in-the-Middle (MITM), and Denial of Service (DoS). OMNeT++/Castalia simulations across six mobility and density scenarios demonstrate stable overhead, with per-node energy consumption of 32.82-32.86 mJ, single-session creation time of 5.1-135 ms, two-session creation time of 39.2-162 ms, and low packet loss of 1.8-4.1 under higher-density deployments. These results indicate that D2VAuth provides scalable, energy-efficient, and resilient authentication suitable for practical drone-assisted IoV applications such as logistics, surveillance, and secure vehicular networks.