Toward efficient authentication for space-air-ground integrated Internet of things

Space-air-ground integrated Internet of things can improve the scope of Internet of things applications significantly by offering truly global coverage all over the world. While space-air-ground integrated Internet of things is promising to be very useful in many aspects, its deployment and application should overcome severe security threats, for example, interceptions, identity forgery, data tampering, and so on. Authentication is an essential step to protect the Internet of things security, and mutual authentication (i.e. two-way authentication) is especially important to ensure the security of both communication parties simultaneously. However, the intrinsical properties of network dynamics and wide coverage make the authentication concern in space-air-ground integrated Internet of things extremely challenging than traditional Internet of things networks. In this article, we propose MASIT, an identity-based efficient and lightweight mutual authentication scheme for space-air-ground integrated Internet of things. MASIT exploits the natural broadcast property of space-air-ground integrated Internet of things to speed up authentication process, and leverage the distinguished feature of IPv6 to support concurrent numerous nodes. Theoretically, we prove that MASIT is existential unforgeable secure under adaptively chosen message and identity Attacks. We also implement MASIT and other existing typical identity-based encryption schemes and evaluate their performance in real platforms. Experimental results showed that, MASIT outperforms the existing identity-based encryption schemes significantly, that is, the signature verification time can be reduced by 50% to 60%, and the user signature size can be reduced by 13% to 50%.