Lightweight and Secure Access to Non-Terrestrial Networks-based Emergency Services for Autonomous Vehicles

Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) are capable of providing wide communication coverage. Autonomous vehicles can leverage NTN to access emergency services when terrestrial networks are affected by disasters. However, there are security challenges associated with communication over wireless links of NTN. Therefore, authentication of vehicles requesting emergency service is essential. This paper highlights the benefits of NTN in emergency scenarios and proposes a secure framework for autonomous vehicles to access emergency services in NTN. In the proposed framework, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), which is a part of NTN, acts as a relay node. As emergency services are time-critical operations, we have designed the proposed protocol leveraging lightweight cryptographic operations, thus keeping computation costs to a minimum. We have provided formal security analysis using the Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic and informal security analysis to demonstrate the security of the proposed protocol. Performance analysis shows that the computation and communication costs of the proposed protocol are less than those of other existing schemes for NTN authentication.