Mutual Friendly Force Identification Protocol based on Hash-Chain for Personal Combat Systems
Jongkwan Lee · KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems · 2020
In this paper, we propose a hash-chain based friendly force identification protocol for personal combatants equipped with a personal combat system in a tactical wireless network.It is imperative in military operations to effectively and quickly identify friendly forces.If the identification of friendly forces is not correct, this can cause friendly fire.In current ground operations, the identification of friendly forces by personal combatants is neither secure nor safe.To address this issue, the proposed protocol uses a hash-chain to determine if a detected person is friendly.Only friendly forces with the same materials that are assigned before they deploy can construct an initial hash-chain.Moreover, the hash-chain is changed at specific times.The performance of the proposed protocol is evaluated on the assumption that the secret key is leaked, which is the worst scenario in the security research field.We verify that the proposed protocol is secure for the various attack scenarios, such as message replay attack, fabrication attack, and Denial of Service attack.