An Efficient ECC-Based Authentication Scheme against Clock Asynchronous for Spatial Information Network

With the rapid development of mobile communication technology, the spatial information networks (SIN) have been used for various space tasks’ coverage in commercial, meteorology, emergency, and military scenarios. In SIN, one basic issue is to achieve mutual authentication and secret communication among the participants. Although many researches have designed authentication schemes for SIN, they have not considered the situation where the clock is not synchronized as the broad coverage space in wireless environment. In this paper, we disclose several flaws of Altaf et al.’s scheme (2020), in which the main weakness is that a malicious user can easily obtain the master key of the network control center after launching the offline password-guessing attack. Then, we design an authentication scheme against clock asynchronous for SIN by utilizing elliptic curve cryptosystem (ECC) and identity-based cryptography (IBC). Based on a brief introduction to the main design ideas of our scheme, the security protocol analysis tools of Scyther and AVISPA are used to prove that the scheme can resist various existing active and passive attacks. We further discuss our scheme that provides five essential requirements of security properties to design a robust scheme for SIN and is superior in terms of resistance to security functionality and computational performance by comparison with two other representative schemes. As a result, our scheme will be workable and efficient security for mobile users in the actual environment.