SRAKN: Secure Roaming Authentication and Key Negotiation protocol for Space Information Network

Abstract

Nowadays, the Space Information Network (SIN) with global signal coverage, large capacity, bandwidth-on-demand flexibility, and multiple services has attracted more and more users to enjoy real-time services without geographical restrictions. However, due to the openness of the satellite-to-ground wireless link, users are vulnerable to various attacks when accessing SIN and obtaining subscription services, which may pose security threats to user privacy, message integrity and confidentiality. Although many authentication protocols have been proposed to protect the security of access and data transmission, most of them are only applicable to the authentication scenarios in the home domain, without considering the security threats of roaming authentication in foreign domains. Moreover, the existing roaming authentication protocols still have some defects such as security vulnerabilities, long authentication delay, and high communication overhead. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new secure roaming authentication and key negotiation protocol based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) for SIN, namely the SRAKN protocol, which also supports conditional anonymity and batch verification. In the roaming authentication phase, not only fast and low-overhead mutual authentication between the roaming user, satellite node and the foreign terrestrial control station (FTCS) is realized, but also a secure session key is jointly negotiated by the roaming user and FTCS to protect the subscription service transmission. The results of security analysis and performance comparison show that the SRAKN protocol is not only secure and resistant to various known attacks, but also has shorter roaming authentication delay, lower batch authentication overhead and communication overhead, making it more suitable for roaming users to access SIN in foreign domains.