APQA: An anonymous post quantum access authentication scheme based on lattice for space ground integrated network

Abstract

The rapidly developing Space Ground Integrated Network (SGIN) will provide communication services for massive nodes worldwide, and the authentication protocol is the key step in ensuring the security of SGIN. However, the current authentication schemes rely on security based on discrete logarithms and large integer decomposition problems, which are vulnerable to quantum computing attacks. Meanwhile, the energy and storage capacity of satellites are limited, making it impossible to deploy a highly complex authentication algorithm. Therefore, we propose an anonymous post quantum access authentication scheme based on lattice to meet the security requirements of the SGIN. During the registration phase, an online registration algorithm is developed using the Regev encryption mechanism to securely transmit the entity’s encrypted identity, thereby lowering the storage costs. In the authentication phase, an anonymous authentication algorithm based on the rejection sampling method is proposed to achieve the confidentiality of the private key and identity of the entity through zero-knowledge technology. This approach reduces the computational complexity of the authentication algorithm and decreases the computation time during the authentication phase. Theoretical proof and performance analysis demonstrate that the proposed scheme can resist quantum computation attacks and reduce the computation time by 36% compared to the existing authentication schemes.