A lightweight authentication scheme based on self‐updating strategy for space information network

The security of space information network (SIN) is getting more and more important now. Because of the special features of SIN (e.g., the dynamic and unstable topology, the highly exposed links, the restricted computation power, the flexible networking methods, and so on), the security protocol for SIN should have a balance between security properties and computation/storage overhead. Although a lot of security protocols have been proposed recently, few can provide overall attacks resistance power with low computation and storage cost. To solve this problem, in this paper we propose a lightweight authentication scheme for space information network. It is mainly based on the self‐updating strategy for user's temporary identity. The scheme consists of two phases, namely, the registration phase and the authentication phase. All the computing operations involved are just hash function (h), the bit‐wise exclusive‐or operation (⊕), and the string concatenation operation (||), which are of low computation cost. The security properties discussion and the attacks–resistance power analysis show that the proposed authentication scheme can defend against various typical attacks, especially denial of service attacks. It is sufficiently secure with the lowest computation and storage costs. Furthermore, the formal security proof in SVO logic also demonstrates that the scheme can satisfy the security goals very well. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.