Pre-Cached Certificate Validation for Aircraft Ground Handshakes
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Solution Overview
Problem
Aircraft face challenges in establishing secure communications with ground entities due to limited RF bandwidth, leading to high communication overhead and frequent handshake failures from time-out constraints, which are exacerbated by the need for elaborate handshake protocols and short-lived public key certificates.
Innovation Solution
A method involving a trusted responder that validates public key certificates and stores trust indications in a pre-cached validation database, allowing for quick validation responses during secure communication setup, thereby reducing the need for real-time certificate validation and minimizing handshake duration.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If an elaborate handshake protocol is used to establish secure communication, then security is improved, but communication overhead increases and handshake failure rate increases due to time-out constraints
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs certificate validation in advance before the actual communication handshake. The trusted responder pre-validates the ground entity's certificate and caches the validation result, so that during the handshake phase, the validation can be quickly retrieved from cache rather than performed in real-time, thus reducing handshake duration while maintaining security
Solution Approach 2:
A trusted responder is introduced as an intermediary between the aircraft and ground entity. The trusted responder performs certificate validation and provides validation responses during the handshake, offloading the computational burden from the aircraft and enabling faster validation that meets the tight time constraints of aviation communication
2Reliability
If real-time certificate validation is performed during handshake, then security is ensured, but RF bandwidth consumption increases
Solution Approach 1:
Certificate validation is performed in advance and results are cached in the trusted responder. During the actual communication, the pre-validated certificate information is retrieved from cache rather than performing full validation in real-time, significantly reducing RF bandwidth consumption while maintaining security through the cached validation results
Solution Approach 2:
The system creates and stores copies of validated certificate information in a cache database at the trusted responder. These cached copies can be quickly referenced during handshakes without transmitting or processing the full certificate validation data over the RF channel, reducing bandwidth usage while preserving security through the copied validation results
Data Source
AI summary
A method of operating a public key certificate validation system for facilitating a secure communication between an aircraft and a ground entity includes: sending a public key certificate of the ground entity from the ground entity to a trusted responder; at the trusted responder, validating the public key certificate of the ground entity and storing a trust indication regarding the public key certificate of the ground entity in a pre-cached validation database; and at the trusted responder, maintaining the pre-cached validation database for providing a validation response regarding the public key certificate of the ground entity, when a validation request, associated with the secure communication between the aircraft and the ground entity, reaches the trusted responder, wherein the validation response is based on the trust indication regarding the public key certificate of the ground entity from the pre-cached validation database.