Aircraft–Ground Secure Communication With Lower RF Overhead
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Solution Overview
Problem
Aircraft face challenges in establishing secure communications with ground entities due to limited radiofrequency bandwidth, where existing handshake protocols consume significant RF resources and often fail due to time-out constraints, necessitating a method with reduced authentication overhead.
Innovation Solution
A method involving an aircraft sending a communication initialization message with its IP address, allowing the ground entity to obtain the aircraft's public key certificate directly, and responding with its own certificate, thereby reducing the number of messages required for mutual authentication and minimizing RF usage.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If traditional handshake protocols are used for secure communication establishment, then security authentication is achieved, but RF resource consumption increases and time-out failures occur
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts the certificate exchange process from the traditional multi-message handshake protocol. Instead of exchanging certificates through multiple back-and-forth messages, the ground entity obtains the aircraft's certificate directly from a certificate repository using the aircraft identifier, eliminating the need for the aircraft to transmit its certificate over the RF channel. This reduces RF resource consumption while maintaining security authentication.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent implements preliminary action by pre-storing aircraft certificates in a ground-based certificate repository before communication occurs. The ground entity can retrieve certificates in advance without waiting for aircraft transmission, thereby reducing authentication message exchange and RF resource usage during actual communication establishment.
2Reliability
If traditional handshake protocols are used for secure communication establishment, then mutual authentication is achieved, but the number of messages exchanged increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent removes the aircraft-to-ground certificate transmission step from the traditional three-message handshake. The ground entity obtains the aircraft certificate directly from the certificate repository, reducing the message exchange from three messages to two messages while maintaining mutual authentication capability.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces a certificate repository as an intermediary between the aircraft and ground entity. This intermediary stores aircraft certificates and allows the ground entity to retrieve them directly without requiring the aircraft to transmit certificates over the communication channel, thereby reducing message count while preserving authentication integrity.
3Reliability
If traditional handshake protocols are used for secure communication establishment, then encryption keys are exchanged, but communication overhead increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts the certificate transmission function from the communication channel by implementing direct ground-based retrieval from a certificate repository. This eliminates unnecessary certificate transmission messages, reduces communication overhead, and simplifies the handshake protocol while maintaining secure key exchange capability.
Data Source
AI summary
A method for establishing a secure communication between an aircraft and a ground entity includes: sending a communication initialization message from the aircraft to the ground entity, wherein the communication initialization message is included in an IP datagram structure and wherein the IP datagram structure comprises an IP address of the aircraft; at the ground entity, obtaining a public key certificate of the aircraft via the IP address of the aircraft; and sending a public key certificate of the ground entity from the ground entity to the aircraft as part of a response message to the communication initialization message.