LK-AKA: A lightweight location key-based authentication and key agreement protocol for S2S communication

As a supplement to terrestrial networks, satellite communication networks have a lot of advantages, such as wide coverage, large communication capacity, reliable communication quality, and seamless global connectivity, which are highly competitive with traditional communication technologies. However, there are still many security issues and efficiency problems in satellite networks due to the characteristics of satellite communications, such as highly exposed satellite links, dynamical topology, and the limited computational power and storage resources of satellites. Therefore, it is a crucial issue to design a lightweight and secure authentication mechanism to ensure the security of satellite-to-satellite communication (S2S). This paper proposes a lightweight authentication and key agreement scheme for S2S communication based on the symmetric cryptographic system and the satellite location key (LK) constructed by satellite orbital parameters and location information. The formal verification tool Scyther is employed to evaluate the proposed scheme’s security. The security analysis results show that it has good performance in providing security properties and resistance to typical attacks, such as replay attacks, impersonation attacks, and Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attacks. In addition, the performance analysis results demonstrate that our scheme has desired efficiency in terms of signaling overhead, computational overhead, and bandwidth overhead.