Aircraft-Ground Secure Handshake with Trusted Responders
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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 a communication initialization message from the aircraft to the ground entity, which includes a public key certificate and an indication of trusted responders, offloads the validation of the ground entity's public key certificate to a trusted responder network, reducing the number of messages and RF resource usage.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If a standard handshake protocol with public key certificate validation is used, then secure communication is established, but RF resource consumption increases and handshake failure rate increases due to time-out constraints
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies preliminary action by pre-establishing trust relationships between ground entities and trusted responders before the actual communication handshake. The aircraft receives information about trusted responders in advance, and the ground entity can immediately validate certificates using these pre-configured trusted responders without requiring additional back-and-forth communication for trust establishment, thus reducing handshake time while maintaining security.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces trusted responders as intermediaries between the aircraft and ground entity for certificate validation. Instead of direct peer-to-peer validation that requires multiple message exchanges, the trusted responder acts as a mediator that the ground entity queries to validate the aircraft's certificate, significantly reducing the number of messages needed in the handshake protocol and preventing time-outs.
2Reliability
If multiple message exchanges are used for certificate validation in the handshake, then authentication is performed, but RF resource consumption increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts the certificate validation process from the main handshake message exchange between aircraft and ground entity. The validation is performed separately by the ground entity querying pre-configured trusted responders, rather than being embedded in the mutual authentication message exchange. This separation reduces the number of RF messages required for authentication while maintaining security.
Solution Approach 2:
The trusted responder information is preliminarily configured in the aircraft before communication begins. This allows the ground entity to immediately validate certificates using these pre-known trusted responders without requiring additional message exchanges to establish trust relationships, thereby reducing RF resource consumption during the actual handshake.
3Reliability
If the aircraft validates the ground entity's certificate independently, then authentication security is maintained, but the number of messages and RF resource usage increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent uses trusted responders as intermediaries for certificate validation, replacing the need for the aircraft to independently validate the ground entity's certificate. The ground entity queries the trusted responder to validate the aircraft's certificate, and the trusted responder's signature on the validation result provides sufficient security assurance without requiring complex independent validation logic in the aircraft.
Solution Approach 2:
The ground entity performs the certificate validation itself by querying the trusted responder, rather than requiring the aircraft to perform validation. This self-service approach at the ground entity side maintains authentication security while simplifying the aircraft's role to only sending its certificate for validation, reducing overall message exchange complexity.
Data Source
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AI summary
A method for establishing a secure communication (20) between an aircraft (2) and a ground entity (4) includes: sending a communication initialization message (22) from the aircraft (2) to the ground entity (4), wherein the communication initialization message (22) comprises a public key certificate of the aircraft (2) and wherein the communication initialization message (22) comprises an indication of at least one trusted responder (8); at the ground entity (4), sending a validation request (30) regarding a public key certificate of the ground entity (4) to a selected one of the at least one trusted responder (8) and receiving a validation response (32) from the selected one of the at least one trusted responder (8); and sending the public key certificate of the ground entity (4) and forwarding the validation response (32) from the ground entity to the aircraft as part of a response message (24) to the communication initialization message (22).