As the number of user equipment (UE) in any heterogeneous network (HetNet) assisted by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) continues to grow, so does the number of intruder nodes. The intruder/malicious nodes are able to interfere with the ongoing data transmission in the network and carry out different kinds of active and passive attacks such as spoofing, masquerading, impersonating, and so on in the network thus requiring an optimized security technique for the network. This article implements the novel functional encryption (FE) technique in the proposed UAV assisted HetNet model for the dense urban area to secure data against such intrusions. In this network model, UAV acts as a relay node for those UE which are in nonline‐of‐sight communication with macro based station (MBS). For securing the data transmission among UAV, UE, and MBS, FE technique is implemented in the network in two phases: the first phase between UE and MBS and the second phase between MBS and UE through UAV. During implementation, the Dolev‐Yao attack model is considered in which intruders are able to intercept or modify the UE data. The main objective of the FE technique implementation is to provide security from such intrusion attacks. The proposed methodology is validated using automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications (AVISPA) tool. The results of the AVISPA tool clearly indicate that the proposed technique is safe to implement in the UAV assisted HetNet, even in the presence of intruder nodes.

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One of the major applications of the Heterogeneous Network (HetNet) is in the healthcare system. Deploying HetNet in healthcare systems enables patients, physicians, and other stakeholders to communicate easily with each other. Due to the large growth in the network's subscribers, the security of the stored health data became one of the major concerns because unauthorized access to this data may lead to very serious complications, and unreliable transmission of data may lead to fatal risks to the patient's life. Therefore, taking data integrity into consideration, user authentication has become one of the main factors. However, significant research work has been performed at HetNet's physical layer to secure communication, but the result of this leads to an increase in hardware components. The increasing hardware components not only costs money but also power consumption. Therefore, this paper presents an alternate way of securing communication in HetNet at the network layer. However, resolving security problems at the network layer increases computational complexity. Nevertheless, earlier, some encryption techniques like identity-based encryption (IBE), symmetric key encryption (SKE), and public-key encryption (PKE) have been utilized for securing data. Due to their own disadvantages, this paper utilizes an attribute-based encryption (ABE) authentication scheme for securing health data in medical applications. With the help of this method, access to the intruders is denied which results in reduced communication overhead. This authentication scheme helps protect the essential information against attacks by the intruders. It includes a third party server that helps to authenticate and store patient's information. The whole security technique has been written in the form of HLPSL (high-level protocol specification language) codes, and the results are then validated with the help of AVISPA (automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications) tool.

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