A lightweight authentication and key agreement scheme for mobile satellite communication systems

Abstract

Although many authentication and key agreement (AKA) schemes for the mobile satellite communication system have been proposed nowadays, the security performance of the existing schemes is still unable to satisfy the requirements of satellite communications. In 2015, Zhang et al. proposed an improved AKA scheme for satellite communication and they claimed that their scheme satisfied all the security requirements. However through a detailed analysis, in this paper we find that to some extent their scheme is vulnerable to replay attack, injection attack and verification table stolen attack. We further propose a new lightweight AKA scheme based on the synchronization mechanism of user’s temporary identity. The SVO logic is used to provide a formal security analysis. We also give an overall comparison of computation overhead and security performance among several related AKA schemes. Meanwhile a Java program is developed to test the time delay caused by the scheme on the user and NCC’s sides. All the results show that the proposed scheme has the advantages of high computation efficiency, good security performance and low time delay.