A Lightweight Authentication and Key Sharing Protocol for Satellite Communication

Abstract

Due to various critical aspects of information security, using Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) in many real-world communication applications is advantageous. Satellite communication is also among those applications where communication security is vital; hence, PFS is valuable. Security protocols are widely used to exchange session keys after authentication in many applications. However, the majority of existing security protocols use cryptographic algorithms (e.g., asymmetric/symmetric encryption and hash function to ensure the security of the protocol, which results in slow processing. Also, most of them require the exchange of several messages, which result in additional delay in communication and waste of bandwidth in terms of exchange of additional data. This paper presents a new authentication and key sharing protocol, which is much simpler and lighter hence faster than other protocols and still very secure because of having security comparable to that of theoretically secure One Time Pad.