The Space Information Network (SIN) plays a crucial role in terrestrial communication, delivering time-bound services from ground stations to users. It relies on moving low-orbit earth (LEO) satellites for uninterrupted coverage. However, untrustworthy connectivity poses several security challenges during handover services for users maintained by the satellites. While traditional cryptographic techniques provide a degree of security, the advent of quantum computing exposes significant vulnerabilities. This work proposes a quantum-safe and continuous authentication mechanism with handover provision. The proposed authentication protocol uses post-quantum primitives of the Frodo key encapsulation mechanism, currently an approved mechanism under ISO/IEC 18033-2. It ensures privacy and ensures users’ anonymity. The security of the proposed protocol is analyzed using the quantum random oracle (QROM) model. Formal verification confirms its safety for practical adoption as a post-quantum candidate. Further, the performance evaluation shows an authentication delay and energy consumption of the proposed protocol within practical limits, making it a suitable candidate for privacy-preserved post-quantum adoption for SIN.
The Space Information Network (SIN) plays a crucial role in terrestrial communication, delivering time-bound services from ground stations to users. It relies on moving low-orbit earth (LEO) satellites for uninterrupted coverage. However, untrustworthy connectivity poses several security challenges during handover services for users maintained by the satellites. While traditional cryptographic techniques provide a degree of security, the advent of quantum computing exposes significant vulnerabilities. This work proposes a quantum-safe and continuous authentication mechanism with handover provision. The proposed authentication protocol uses post-quantum primitives of the Frodo key encapsulation mechanism, currently an approved mechanism under ISO/IEC 18033-2. It ensures privacy and ensures users’ anonymity. The security of the proposed protocol is analyzed using the quantum random oracle (QROM) model. Formal verification confirms its safety for practical adoption as a post-quantum candidate. Further, the performance evaluation shows an authentication delay and energy consumption of the proposed protocol within practical limits, making it a suitable candidate for privacy-preserved post-quantum adoption for SIN.
Currently, due to the high scalability and global coverage of space information network (SIN), more service providers and users are willing to provide or subscribe to personal services through the satellite network. However, the messages are transmitted in public satellite-ground links, which makes access users vulnerable to various forms of attacks. Existing authentication protocols do not meet the expected security and short delay requirements to ensure the security of real-time user access and the confidentiality of communication content. Moreover, with the development of quantum computers, the difficult problems such as ECDLP and DLP have also been proven to be solvable in polynomial time, leading to new threats. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a provably secure and anti-quantum authentication protocol based on randomized RLWE. The protocol not only meets the pre-defined security requirements, but also reduces the total delay of the authentication phase based on the pre-negotiation and fewer authentication transmission. In addition, a concise handover scheme is designed for signal handover scenarios caused by satellite dynamic topology. Further rigorous formal and informal security proofs and performance analysis show that our proposed protocol is more applicable to SIN, while ensuring higher security and resisting various attacks with lower authentication delay.
With the continuous development of satellite communication and Internet of things technology, more and more devices can access space information networks (SIN) and enjoy satellite services everywhere in the world. However, due to the openness of the air-to-ground channel, the device will face a series of security threats when accessing SIN, such as replay attacks, eavesdropping attacks, impersonation attacks, and man-in-the-middle attacks. These security threats will lead to illegal entity access and further endanger the reliability and availability of the system. Although scholars have proposed many enhanced security access authentication protocols, most of them have been proved to have security vulnerabilities. In addition, with the development of quantum computing, the previous authentication protocols based on some asymmetric cryptographic mechanisms such as discrete logarithm and elliptic curve cryptographic mechanisms may face new security challenges. In this context, this paper proposes a novel anti-quantum access authentication protocol based on ring learning with errors (RLWE), which meets more security requirements and greatly reduces the authentication delay through pre-negotiation. Through the security analysis and performance analysis, it is shown that our protocol can be more suitable for delay-sensitive IoT devices to access SIN while ensuring higher security.
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.
Currently, space information network (SIN) has become an increasingly important role in real life. As a large heterogeneous wireless network, SIN can better provide global mobile services to users anytime and anywhere, even in extreme geographic environments. In addition, there is no need to build the communication base-stations every few kilometers on the ground to ensure high service quality, which greatly reduces the construction costs and can be used as an economical communication method in sparsely populated areas. So there is a trend that more and more end users are more likely to get SIN services than traditional terrestrial cellular networks. However, due to the openness and publicity of the satellite wireless channel and the limited resources of the satellite nodes, the privacy and security cannot be perfectly guaranteed and may even be vulnerable to attacks initiated by the adversary such as replay attacks, impersonation attacks, and eavesdropping attacks. To improve the access security of SIN, researchers have proposed a series of authentication protocols based on different cryptographic assumptions. Nevertheless, existing research shows that these protocols cannot meet the requirements of higher and higher security and short authentication delay. In addition, these protocols are mainly based on public key cryptography mechanisms such as DLP and ECDLP, which can be solved by postquantum computers in polynomial time, so these protocols will no longer be secure. To solve the vulnerability of these protocols, in this paper, we propose a new RLWE-based anonymous mutual authentication and key agreement protocol, which guarantees higher security with low computational overhead even in the postquantum era. Detailed security analysis shows that our protocol meets security requirements and is resistant to a variety of known attacks. Besides, combining security comparison and performance analysis, our proposed protocol is more practical than other protocols in SIN.
Modern societies increasingly rely on interconnected devices and individuals for information exchange and monitoring. In this manner, drones, as flying smart nodes in the wireless network ecosystem, facilitate diverse applications, such as industrial, civilian, and disaster response operations. However, the widespread adoption of drone networks introduces significant challenges regarding interoperability, privacy, and security. Advances in quantum computing exacerbate these issues by rendering classical cryptographic measures inadequate, necessitating the adoption of quantum-safe approaches. Existing solutions fail to address all potential threats or lack post-quantum security. This work sets out to propose a robust lattice-based authentication and communication protocol for drone networks, addressing these challenges. The protocol integrates dynamic credentials, timestamps, multi-factor authentication, and context information to enhance security. The scheme's security is analyzed using the DY and BPR models and formally verified via the AVISPA tool. Performance evaluations and comparisons with existing solutions demonstrate the protocol's functionality, showcasing a reasonable trade-off between security and performance. By leveraging modern cryptographic techniques, the proposed scheme ensures reliable and robust drone operations, effectively mitigating various attacks beyond session establishment while safeguarding privacy, and supporting dynamic network events.
The inherent broadcast characteristics of satellite communication systems make them vulnerable to interception and manipulation threats. Stringent Authentication and KeyEstablishment (AKE) mechanisms play a vital role in securing satellite communication links by verifying legitimate participants and establishing a secret session for protected communication. Nevertheless, the existing AKE mechanisms based on classical cryptographic methods are not sufficient to guarantee the security of these systems in the forthcoming post-quantum era. Recognizing these flaws, we propose a quantum-secure robust AKE mechanism that fortifies these communications systems against emerging cyber and quantum threats. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to integrate NIST-approved quantum-safe cryptography primitives, coupled with a hardware fingerprinting-based key generation mechanism.