This article presents a unique protocol based on a lightweight cryptographic technique called elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), secure hash algorithm (SHA-1), concatenation, and XOR operations to establish communication sessions between two drones efficiently. The ground control station keeps shared credentials separately at the time of registration in the memory of each drone. After deploying these drones for tactical tasks, they exchanged the shared credentials and securely authenticated each other, which in turn securely started communication. The result obtained from the analysis section demonstrated that the proposed drone-to-drone mutual authentication protocol is superior and feasible for secure communication between two drones.
