A Certificateless Encryption-Based Authentication Protocol for Low Earth Orbit Satellite Network

Area of Science:

• Computer Science
• Network Security
• Satellite Communications

Background:

• Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks face challenges with massive sensor users, requiring efficient and secure access and handover authentication.
• Traditional authentication methods often involve complex computations and certificate management, unsuitable for resource-constrained LEO satellites.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a novel, lightweight, and privacy-preserving access and handover authentication scheme for LEO satellite networks.
• To address the signaling storm and handover issues caused by dense deployment of massive sensor terminals.

Main Methods:

• Developed a certificateless cryptography-based scheme, eliminating bilinear pairing operations and certificate management overhead.
• Incorporated lightweight elliptic curve point addition for reduced computational load.
• Designed a location-aware, user-grouping-based collaborative handover authentication protocol.

Main Results:

• The proposed scheme satisfies mutual authentication, anonymous identity privacy, known-key security, and master key forward secrecy.
• Achieved superior security performance and significantly reduced signaling interaction overhead compared to traditional methods.
• Demonstrated up to 69.81% improvement in handover success rate under high-density access conditions.

Conclusions:

• The novel authentication scheme offers a lightweight, secure, and efficient solution for LEO satellite networks with massive sensor users.
• The collaborative handover protocol effectively mitigates signaling storms and enhances handover reliability.