Big Data-Enabled Authentication Framework for Offshore Maritime Communication Using Drones

The maritime transportation industry is a prime target for cybersecurity attacks due to the inherent risks of transmitting sensitive information required for its smooth operation. The introduction of digital systems in maritime transport has made them susceptible to a range of cybersecurity threats. These attacks can lead to the unauthorized acquisition and misuse of vulnerable data, such as personal information of crew and passengers, vessel location, route, schedule, and other related information. To address this issue, a new lightweight authentication protocol has been proposed by utilizing drone technology in conjunction with the 5th generation mobile network (5G) communication. The effectiveness of the proposed protocol has been analyzed, which demonstrates its ability to withstand various security attacks while maintaining low communication and computation costs. Furthermore, it successfully meets the security and functionality requirements of anonymity and untraceability. A comprehensive simulation study and simulation using the network simulator (NS3) have been conducted to assess the impact on various network performance parameters for the proposed scheme. In addition, various experiments using machine-learning algorithms for Big data analytics show the efficiency of the proposed scheme in terms of accuracy, precision, recall and F1 score.