Low-Latency Authentication Against Satellite Compromising for Space Information Network

Abstract

With an advancement of mobile communication technology, the space information network (SIN) has been proposed to meet the increasing demands of mobile communication due to its advantage of providing great expanding access services. In SIN, authentication is significant for the security to prevent the network resource from unauthorized access. However, the features of highly exposed links and extremely high propagation delay make it difficult to design a secure and fast authentication scheme for SIN. Although some existing researches have tried to design authentication protocols for SIN, they haven't taken the intolerable authentication delay and the risk of satellite compromising into consideration. Faced with these problems, we design a proxy signature-based authentication scheme for SIN, in which, the interaction process of authentication can be only implemented between the mobile user and the satellite node, thus reducing the long authentication implementation delay. Furthermore, we utilize the proxy signature to mitigate the risk of satellites being attacked. The results of security and performance analysis show that the proposed scheme can provide the required security and largely reduce the authentication latency.