The aviation industry faces significant challenges due to rising global air travel demand. Frequency saturation in Air Traffic Management (ATM) leads to communication problems, necessitating the enhancement of traditional systems. The Single European Sky ATM Research (SESAR) initiative, backed by the European Commission, aims to digitize ATM, with the L-band Digital Aeronautical Communications System (LDACS) as a key component. LDACS aims to improve communication, enhance surveillance, and optimize airspace usage for safer, more efficient ATM. Although LDACS is protected against most cyberattacks, a critical security objective, anonymity, is currently overlooked. To strengthen LDACS’s security, robust authentication mechanisms, Post-Quantum security, and measures to ensure aircraft anonymity are crucial. Therefore, we propose a comprehensive security framework to enhance LDACS’s cybersecurity, focusing on mutual authentication and key agreement. The protocol uses Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) for robust mutual authentication and Bit-flipping Key Encapsulation (BIKE) for secure session key establishment utilizing Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC). This framework ensures anonymity and secure communication between aircraft and ground stations while minimizing message exchange, latency, and data overhead. An informal security analysis confirms our proposed framework’s potential to augment the efficiency and security of ATM operations.
The aviation industry faces significant challenges due to rising global air travel demand. Frequency saturation in Air Traffic Management (ATM) leads to communication problems, necessitating the enhancement of traditional systems. The Single European Sky ATM Research (SESAR) initiative, backed by the European Commission, aims to digitize ATM, with the L-band Digital Aeronautical Communications System (LDACS) as a key component. LDACS aims to improve communication, enhance surveillance, and optimize airspace usage for safer, more efficient ATM. Although LDACS is protected against most cyberattacks, a critical security objective, anonymity, is currently overlooked. To strengthen LDACS’s security, robust authentication mechanisms, Post-Quantum security, and measures to ensure aircraft anonymity are crucial. Therefore, we propose a comprehensive security framework to enhance LDACS’s cybersecurity, focusing on mutual authentication and key agreement. The protocol uses Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) for robust mutual authentication and Bit-flipping Key Encapsulation (BIKE) for secure session key establishment utilizing Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC). This framework ensures anonymity and secure communication between aircraft and ground stations while minimizing message exchange, latency, and data overhead. An informal security analysis confirms our proposed framework’s potential to augment the efficiency and security of ATM operations.
The L-Band Digital Aeronautical Communication System (LDACS) aims to transform aviation communications into a quantum-safe setup, where recent proposals utilize Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) as an authentication mechanism and quantum-safe algorithms as a Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM). However, the existence of novel techniques that predict the behavior of PUFs, along with severe vulnerabilities in PostQuantum Cryptography (PQC) schemes being exploitable by attacks running on classical computing infrastructures, raises concerns about their security. In this context, the paper performs a security assessment of LDACS and the extent to which the secret quantities used during the mutual authentication between an aircraft and ground control can be disclosed. It is shown that an intelligent quantum preimage algorithm can reveal these aforementioned PUF secret quantities, which are also susceptible to sophisticated side channel attacks even on isolated workstations. In addition, information set decoding and entropy are used to evaluate the strength of the proposed KEMs for LDACS, which are also benchmarked to identify trade-offs between security and performance. Overall, our findings suggest a hardware implementation of CRYSTALS-Kyber as KEM, to further reduce latency, and the utilization of a public key infrastructure for authentication.
The rapid digitization of aviation communication and its dependent critical operations demand secure protocols that address domain-specific security requirements within the unique functional constraints of the aviation industry. These secure protocols must provide sufficient security against current and possible future attackers, given the inherent nature of the aviation community, that is highly complex and averse to frequent upgrades as well as its high safety and cost considerations. In this work we propose a pair of quantum-secure hybrid key exchange protocols (PQAG-KEMandPQAG-SIG) to secure communication between aircrafts in-flight and ground stations.PQAG-KEMleverages post-quantum and classical Key Encapsulation Mechanisms (KEMs) to ensure the hybrid security of the protocol against classical as well as future quantum adversaries.PQAG-SIG, alternatively, uses quantum-safe digital signatures to achieve authentication security. We provide an implementation of bothPQAG-KEMandPQAG-SIG, and compare favourably with current state-of-the-art secure avionic protocols. Finally, we provide a formal analysis of our newPQAGprotocols in a strong hybrid key exchange framework.
In this paper, a generic post-quantum authentication protocol is constructed for quantum-resistant satellite communication. This scheme was proposed to address emerging authentication needs in post-quantum satellite communication systems consistent with evolving standards such as Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) and European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). In the proposed authentication, it is aimed to obtain additional security features and low communication complexity based on simple operations and post-quantum algorithms. The mutual authentication is achieved by using Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF), Hash Message Authentication Code (HMAC), and post-quantum cryptography (PQC) primitives. The security analysis shows that the proposed authentication provides additional security properties and resistance to replay and man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks. The main difference between the proposed protocol and PQC-based authentication for satellites in the literature is that it does not require complex operations and provides anonymity, integrity, and legitimacy with the help of lightweight principles. The proposed scheme leverages National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)-approved post-quantum cryptographic primitives (e.g., CRYSTALS-Kyber, HQC, SHA3-256), while the overall authentication protocol design is novel and constitutes the main contribution of our work.
Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites have different security problems in addition to nice properties such as low latency and wide coverage. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) rely on these satellites for communication, which makes authentication with Network Control Centres (NCCs) critical. In this paper, a physically unclonable function (PUF)-based lightweight, post-quantum mutual authentication and key establishment protocol tailored for satellite-assisted UAV-NCC links is proposed to address these problems. The scheme uses the benefits of PUF and lightweight cryptographic operations to obtain an efficient scheme for resource-constrained environments while ensuring mutual authentication and quantum-resistant session key establishment.
Satellite communication networks play a critical role in providing connectivity to remote regions and areas with limited infrastructure. However, their inherently open nature and physical exposure make them particularly susceptible to security threats, including replay, impersonation, and man-in- the-middle attacks. The emergence of quantum computing further undermines the robustness of conventional cryptographic schemes that rely on number-theoretic assumptions. To mitigate these challenges, this article proposesHBQS, a lightweight post-quantum authentication framework designed for satellite platforms with limited resources.HBQSintegrates Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) with hash-based cryptography, leveraging SPHINCS+ digital signatures and SHA-3 hashing to provide secure mutual authentication and session key establishment. The protocolHBQSwas implemented and evaluated on embedded hardware platforms, including Raspberry Pi 4.0, PYNQ-Z2 FPGA, and a Dell ground control station. The experimental results demonstrate thatHBQSachieves mutual authentication in 0.88 ms, offering an approximately 67% reduction in execution time compared to representative baselines from the prior literature. Entropy analysis confirms that the proposed protocol maintains a high entropy across critical components, withHBQSachieving a signature entropy of 164.63 bits and PUF response entropy of 172.58 bits, indicating strong resistance to statistical and modeling attacks. A formal security analysis conducted within the Random Oracle Model demonstrates semantic security against both classical and quantum adversaries. The protocolHBQSshows a significant improvement over existing methods, achieving approximately 67% reduction in computational execution time, approximately 11.5% faster user-side handshake time, approximately 0.6% improvement on the satellite side and full security coverage across all evaluated security features with only a 21.4% increase in static memory usage as the trade-off. These findings positionHBQSas an efficient, secure, and scalable authentication solution for next-generation satellite communication systems operating in the post-quantum era.
With the increasing demand for drones in diverse tasks, the Internet of Drones (IoD) has recently emerged as a significant technology in academia and industry. The IoD environment enables various services, such as traffic and environmental monitoring, disaster situation management, and military operations. However, IoD communication is vulnerable to security threats due to the exchange of sensitive information over insecure public channels. Moreover, public key-based cryptographic schemes are impractical for communication with resource-constrained drones due to their limited computational capability and resource capacity. Therefore, a secure and lightweight key agreement scheme must be developed while considering the characteristics of the IoD environment. In 2024, Alzahrani proposed a secure key agreement protocol for securing the IoD environment. However, Alzahrani’s protocol suffers from high computational overhead due to its reliance on elliptic curve cryptography and is vulnerable to drone and mobile user impersonation attacks and session key disclosure attacks by eavesdropping on public-channel messages. Therefore, this work proposes a lightweight and security-enhanced key agreement scheme for the IoD environment to address the limitations of Alzahrani’s protocol. The proposed protocol employs a physical unclonable function and simple cryptographic operations (XOR and hash functions) to achieve high security and efficiency. This work demonstrates the security of the proposed protocol using informal security analysis. This work also conducted formal security analysis using the Real-or-Random (RoR) model, Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic, and Automated Verification of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) simulation to verify the proposed protocol’s session key security, mutual authentication ability, and resistance to replay and MITM attacks, respectively. Furthermore, this work demonstrates that the proposed protocol offers better performance and security by comparing the computational and communication costs and security features with those of relevant protocols.