AnFRA: Anonymous and Fast Roaming Authentication for Space Information Network

Abstract

Nowadays, the Space Information Network (SIN) has been widely used in real life because of its advantages of communicating anywhere at any time. This feature is leading to a new trend that traditional wireless users are willing to roam to SIN to obtain a better service. However, the features of exposed links and higher signal latency in SIN make it difficult to design a secure and fast roaming authentication scheme for this new trend. Although some existing researches have been focused on designing secure authentication protocols for SIN or providing roaming authentication protocols for traditional wireless networks, these schemes cannot provide adequate requirements for the roaming communication in SIN and bring in critical issues, such as the privacy leakage or intolerable authentication delay. Observing these problems have not been well addressed, we design an anonymous and fast roaming authentication scheme for SIN. In our scheme, we utilize the group signature to provide the anonymity for roaming users, and assume that the satellites have limited computing capacity and make them have the defined authentication function to avoid the real-time involvement of the home network control center when authenticating the roaming users. The results of security and performance analysis show that the proposed scheme can provide the required security features, while providing a small authentication delay.