An SSL-PUF Based Access Authentication and Key Distribution Scheme for the Space-Air-Ground Integrated Network

Area of Science:

• Cybersecurity
• Network Engineering
• Materials Science

Background:

• Space-Air-Ground Integrated Networks (SAGIN) face significant authentication and key distribution challenges due to dynamic architectures and limited resources.
• Public key cryptography, while suitable for dynamic access, suffers from time-consuming operations.
• Existing solutions often rely on pre-shared symmetric keys, limiting security and flexibility.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a novel access authentication and key distribution scheme for SAGIN.
• To leverage semiconductor superlattice (SSL) physical unclonable functions (PUFs) as a hardware root of trust.
• To achieve secure and efficient dynamic access without pre-shared keys.

Main Methods:

• Utilizing matched semiconductor superlattice (SSL) pairs for full entropy key distribution over public channels.
• Implementing an inherent security mechanism based on SSL PUF properties for authentication.
• Conducting formal security analysis and performance evaluations.

Main Results:

• The proposed scheme provides spontaneous authentication and key distribution, eliminating key management burdens.
• It achieves authentication, confidentiality, integrity, and forward security, defending against common attacks.
• Performance evaluations show advantages over elliptic curve and bilinear pairing-based protocols.

Conclusions:

• The SSL-based scheme offers unconditional security and dynamic key management for SAGIN.
• It provides comparable performance to symmetric key-based methods while enhancing security.
• This approach addresses the limitations of traditional cryptographic methods in complex network environments.