Zhong Yantao

A highly secure identity-based authenticated key-exchange protocol for satellite communication

In recent years, significant improvements have been made to the techniques used for analyzing satellite communication and attacking satellite systems. In 2003, a research team at Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA, demonstrated the ease with which civilian global positioning system (GPS) spoofing attacks can be implemented. They fed fake signals to the GPS receiver so that it operates as though it were located at a position different from its actual location. Moreover, Galileo in-orbit validation element A and Compass-M1 civilian codes in all available frequency bands were decoded in 2007 and 2009. These events indicate that cryptography should be used in addition to the coding technique for secure and authenticated satellite communication. In this study, we address this issue by using an authenticated key-exchange protocol to build a secure and authenticated communication channel for satellite communication. Our protocol uses identity-based cryptography. We also prove the security of our protocol in the extended Canetti-Krawczyk model, which is the strongest security model for authenticated key-exchange protocols, under the random oracle assumption and computational Diffie-Hellman assumption. In addition, our protocol helps achieve high efficiency in both communication and computation and thus improve security in satellite communication.