A novel authentication and key‐agreement scheme for satellite communication network

Summary In these days, satellite communication networks are playing a significant role in facilitating the crucial infrastructural services that include environmental monitoring, electronic surveillance, public safety, intelligence operations for law enforcement, government agencies, and the military. However, security researchers have uncovered that many protocols for these satellite communication networks have some vulnerabilities and flaws that can allow remote attackers to intercept, block, and manipulate critical communication over the network. Therefore, in this article, we introduce an efficient and simple authentication key agreement protocol for securing mobile satellite communication systems. Our proposed protocol resists against denial of service, smart‐card stolen, replay, user impersonation, and stolen verifier attack. Furthermore, our protocol provides various functionality features like perfect‐forward secrecy, mutual‐authentication, dynamic identity, and session‐key agreement. Moreover, the performance analysis of our protocol shows that the communication and computation cost of the proposed protocol is far less than the existing protocols. Hence, our proposed protocol offers simple, efficient, secure authentication, and key agreement for mobile satellite systems.