A novel authentication and key‐agreement scheme for satellite communication network

Abstract

Summary In these days, satellite communication networks are playing a significant role in facilitating the crucial infrastructural services that include environmental monitoring, electronic surveillance, public safety, intelligence operations for law enforcement, government agencies, and the military. However, security researchers have uncovered that many protocols for these satellite communication networks have some vulnerabilities and flaws that can allow remote attackers to intercept, block, and manipulate critical communication over the network. Therefore, in this article, we introduce an efficient and simple authentication key agreement protocol for securing mobile satellite communication systems. Our proposed protocol resists against denial of service, smart‐card stolen, replay, user impersonation, and stolen verifier attack. Furthermore, our protocol provides various functionality features like perfect‐forward secrecy, mutual‐authentication, dynamic identity, and session‐key agreement. Moreover, the performance analysis of our protocol shows that the communication and computation cost of the proposed protocol is far less than the existing protocols. Hence, our proposed protocol offers simple, efficient, secure authentication, and key agreement for mobile satellite systems.

An enhanced dynamic authentication scheme for mobile satellite communication systems

“…This section describes Altaf et al's 20 novel authentication and key‐agreement scheme for satellite communication network. Altaf et al's protocol includes two phases: registration phase and login and authentication phase.…”

“…In the section, we will point out that Altaf et al's 20 protocol is vulnerable to the off‐line password guessing attack, the user impersonation attack, and fails to provide perfect forward security. The detailed description is as follows.…”

“…Altaf et al 20 introduced an efficient and simple authentication key agreement protocol and claimed their enhanced scheme was secured against various attacks like replay, masquerading, stolen‐verifier, and denial of service attack and can provide aided security features that existing schemes do not provide. However, in this paper, we will point out that Altaf et al's scheme cannot resist off‐line password guessing attack and user impersonation attack and fails to provide perfect forward security.…”

“…The main contributions of this paper are as follows. The recently proposed mutual authentication and key‐agreement scheme for satellite communication network by Altaf et al 20 is reviewed, and we find that their scheme exists the problems of off‐line password guessing attack resistance, impersonation attack resistance, and perfect forward security. An enhanced dynamic authentication scheme for mobile satellite communication systems is proposed to overcome the weaknesses in Altaf et al's scheme. The security of the proposed scheme is formally proved under the widely used BPR adversary model. The heuristic discussion of the proposed scheme is presented to show that the new scheme can provide all kinds of security. …”

“…The rest of our work is arranged as follows: Section 2 introduces some preliminaries. Section 3 reviews Altaf et al's protocol 20 . Section 4 points out the weaknesses of Altaf et al's scheme.…”