A secure three-factor anonymous roaming authentication protocol using ECC for space information networks

Nowadays, space information networks (SIN) has been widely used in navigation, observation and military activities due to its advantages of wide coverage, convenient communication and the ability to provide users with multiple services. However, because of the openness of the spatial channel, there are security threats such as information eavesdropping, interception and forgery. So far, many scholars have proposed a series of authentication protocols to support both parties’ authentication and key negotiation in SIN to ensure the security of access and communication. However, most of these protocols lack a login authentication mechanism, which will be vulnerable to smart card theft attacks. In addition, these protocols only support authentication services in the home domain. When users move to a foreign region to use these protocols for access verification, there will be security vulnerabilities, such as authentication failure and the leakage of session keys. To better solve this problem, we design a new ECC-based anonymous authentication protocol with three-factor login verification in this paper. Our protocol not only supports users to authenticate in the home domain, but also supports users to access SIN when roaming to foreign regions. Furthermore, through formal and informal security analysis methods, we prove that our protocol can securely authenticate each other, negotiate the session key and resist various attacks. In addition, combined with performance analysis, our protocol is more suitable for SIN than other related protocols.