A Lightweight and Anonymous MAKE for LDACS

The L-band Digital Aeronautical Communication System (LDACS) plays an important role in ensuring the security of future aeronautical communications infrastructure. However, the establishment of LDACS security design is still complicated because lots of authentication messages need to be transmitted while air-to-ground channel resources are limited. And it lacks anonymous measures to avoid tracking by malicious entities and enhance the security of the authentication process. In contrast to the traditional protocol, we propose a lightweight LDACS Mutual Authentication and Key Establishment (MAKE) protocol with anonymous identity and conduct a security and performance comparison analysis of the protocols in this paper. The analysis results show that the proposed protocol can well achieve the security goals of LDACS, and can well protect the privacy of stations. The number of air-to-ground communication interactions from cell-attachment to mutual authentication has also been reduced to five times, and the total communication cost is 4578 bits.