An Anti-Quantum Authentication Protocol for Space Information Networks Based on Ring Learning with Errors

With the continuous development of satellite communication and Internet of things technology, more and more devices can access space information networks (SIN) and enjoy satellite services everywhere in the world. However, due to the openness of the air-to-ground channel, the device will face a series of security threats when accessing SIN, such as replay attacks, eavesdropping attacks, impersonation attacks, and man-in-the-middle attacks. These security threats will lead to illegal entity access and further endanger the reliability and availability of the system. Although scholars have proposed many enhanced security access authentication protocols, most of them have been proved to have security vulnerabilities. In addition, with the development of quantum computing, the previous authentication protocols based on some asymmetric cryptographic mechanisms such as discrete logarithm and elliptic curve cryptographic mechanisms may face new security challenges. In this context, this paper proposes a novel anti-quantum access authentication protocol based on ring learning with errors (RLWE), which meets more security requirements and greatly reduces the authentication delay through pre-negotiation. Through the security analysis and performance analysis, it is shown that our protocol can be more suitable for delay-sensitive IoT devices to access SIN while ensuring higher security.