Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) has extensively been practiced in the military and civilian surveillance systems that access sensitive data over the cellular networks. However, channel insecurity and battery limitation may not protect the aerial coverage area. Thus, sensitive information gathered through aerial vehicles causes security threats. To manage the security issues, Smart Internet of Drone (S-IoD) have been evolved to use Intelligent Personal Assistant (IPA) as a software agent while monitoring and observing areas of interest. The current state-of-the-art technologies provide ubiquitous communication to enable several Internet of Things (IoT) paradigms. It achieves a feature of a decision support system that allows the smart interaction and communication between real-time entities. IPA offers smart interaction with other smart real-time entities to gain the user's knowledge and awareness. This paper presents an S-IoD framework for a UAV environment that independently collects sensible information. In order to reduce the computation cost of the authentication protocol, a lightweight privacy-preserving scheme (L-PPS) is introduced. The proposed L-PPS is constructive to provide the robustness between the IoT devices with a valid authentication period. To demonstrate the security and performance efficiencies, the formal verification was performed using a verification tool, Scyther, and a random oracle model. In addition, the proposed L-PPS introduces a secret token and dynamic user authentication to speed up the authentication process between the communication entities. Importantly, the authentication session of L-PPS does not use any complex cryptographic operations, whereby it has less computation and communication costs to meet the standard constraints of surveillance systems. Moreover, the obtained simulation analysis proves that the proposed L-PPS achieves better quality metrics than other authentication schemes in the literature. © 2020 Elsevier B.V.