A Secure and Efficient Authentication Protocol for Satellite-Terrestrial Networks

The satellite-terrestrial networks (STNs) network has the characteristics of open links, node movement, dynamic network topology, and diverse collaborative algorithms, which will lead to frequent passive handovers and continuous reauthentication of user equipment (UE). This causes a waste of valuable computing and storage resources in the STNs network and seriously affects the user’s network experience. To address this, we propose an access authentication protocol with user anonymity and traceability to reduce the communication delay and signaling cost of access authentication. In addition, we also propose a hierarchical group key distribution scheme to implement cross-domain handover authentication between different groups of UE, thereby effectively avoiding reauthentication. We take strict security analysis to prove that the authentication protocol we propose is secure. Compared with the three-related existing arts, our protocol can greatly reduce the communication interaction delay and improve the efficiency of initial access and handover authentication of UE.