An Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Blockchain-Based Authentication Scheme for Low Earth Orbit Satellite-Assisted Internet of Things

Recently, integrating satellite networks (e.g., low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite constellation) into the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem has emerged as a potential paradigm to provide more reliable, ubiquitous, and seamless network services. The LEO satellite networks serves as a key enabler to transform the connectivity across industries and geographical border. Despite the convenience brought from the LEO satellite networks, it arises security concerns, in which the essential one is to secure the communication between the IoT devices and the LEO satellite network. However, some challenges inheriting from the LEO satellite networks need to be considered, which are: the dynamic topology; the resource-constraint satellites; the relative long latency; and multiple beams authentication. In particular, the centralized authentication schemes are no longer suitable for the emerging LEO satellite-assisted IoT ecosystem. In this article, we first introduce the architecture of the LEO satellite network-assisted IoT ecosystem. Then, we propose an efficient and privacy-preserving blockchain-based authentication scheme. The proposed authentication scheme takes the advantages of certificateless encryption and consortium blockchain to provide lightweight key pair computation without appealing devices’ information and efficient signature querying and verification. In addition, a fast authentication mechanism is implemented in the scheme in order to reduce the time complexity from querying a certain record for the authentication within a satellite among multiple beams. With the analysis of the storage and computation complexity, the performance evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

I. Introduction

Although the Internet of Things (IoT) seems more than promising to embrace the industrial sectors, such as the oil and gas industry, environmental monitoring, and food and agriculture systems, it can be easily recognized that fundamental performance limitations are related to availability, resilience, and cost of terrestrial connectivity, where the satellite network plays a complementary role in supporting the development of the IoT applications and in realizing the full potential of the interconnected devices [1], [2]. For some IoT applications, the smart devices can be dispersed over a wide geographical area (e.g., ocean, valley, and forest), where the direct terrestrial networks are not available due to the high cost for the deployment and maintenance of the infrastructures, resulting in the lack of the Internet access. In addition, the terrestrial networks rely on the physical infrastructures deployed on the ground to provide wired or wireless connectivity, which are fragile and are easily damaged by nature disasters leading to the severe Internet disruptions. The Gartner, Inc., no single networking technology could satisfy a set of the competing requirements, such as endpoint cost, power consumption, bandwidth, latency, connection density, operating cost, quality of service, and range, where the forthcoming generation of low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite networks will play an irreplaceable role [3]. The Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) satellite constellation network has been recognized for the potential to provide a reliable and dependable connection and has been effectively used as a primary fallback for major links to assure resilience to infrastructure failure, which makes the LEO satellite network ideal for fulfilling the needs of a meaningful percentage of the IoT applications.