During long-distance flight, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) need to perform cross-domain authentication to prove their identity and receive information from the ground control station (GCS). However, the GCS needs to verify all drones arriving at the area it is responsible for, which leads to the GCS being unable to complete authentication in time when facing cross-domain requests from a large number of drones. Additionally, due to potential threats from attackers, drones and GCSs are likely to be deceived. To improve the efficiency and security of cross-domain authentication, we propose an efficient blockchain-based cross-domain authentication scheme for the Internet of Drones (BCDAIoD). By using a consortium chain with a multi-chain architecture, the proposed method can query and update different types of data efficiently. By mutual authentication before cross-domain authentication, drones can compose drone groups to lighten the authentication workload of domain management nodes. BCDAIoD uses the notification mechanism between domains to enable path planning for drones in advance, which can further improve the efficiency of cross-domain authentication. The performance of BCDAIoD was evaluated through experiments. The results show that the cross-domain authentication time cost and computational overhead of BCDAIoD are significantly lower those of than existing methods when the number of drones is large.

This paper focuses on security by design for smart city systems. Insecure smart city systems may cause serious losses to the social, environmental and economic development of smart cities. Therefore, it is essential to ensure security by design for smart city systems. For large-scale, hyper-connected smart city systems consisting of a large number of interconnected devices of different types, analyzing the impact of security threats on the whole system as well as the various aspects of smart cities at the early design stage of the system is an important and difficult problem that remains unsolved. To address this problem, this paper proposes a KPI-guided model-based approach and accompanying prototype tool, named SCKPISec (Smart City KPI-guided Security). By applying the techniques of UML modeling, formal modeling and verification, and KPIs evaluation, SCKPISec provides an effective way to realize KPI-guided security by design for smart city systems. We evaluated SCKPISec through case studies. The results show that SCKPISec can efficiently detect the potential problems of smart city systems under security threats and has high feasibility and applicability in ensuring KPI-guided security by design for smart city systems. Compared with existing model-based security approaches, the advantage of SCKPISec is that it has a highly automated verification process and provides an effective and efficient solution to evaluate the potential KPI losses of smart cities under security threats at the early design stage of smart city systems.

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