A Trust Holding Based Secure Seamless Handover in Space Information Network

Reducing handover delay at the same time of maintaining high level of handover security is always a challenging issue, especially for secure handover in space information network where resources are limited and links are highly exposed and intermittent connected. To address this issue, this paper focuses on reducing handover authentication delay and adopts the secure context transfer method as a replace for handover authentication. To achieve this purpose, a trust holding based secure seamless handover scheme is proposed. In this scheme, a full trust holding mechanism based on finite state machine is firstly proposed to build a light-weighted trust system. Then a secure trust state context transfer method is given based on the full trust holding mechanism. Instead of handover authentication, if a mobile node is trusted by current AP, history trust state information is sent to target AP to verify MN’s identity. A pre-authentication method is introduced as a complement to cope with the situation where MN is not trusted by current AP. With these, a node can easily build a trust relationship with target APs while handover begins. Security proofs and performance analysis demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency.