PMAKE: Physical Unclonable Function-based Mutual Authentication Key Exchange Scheme for Digital Aeronautical Communications
Nils Mäurer, Thomas Gräupl, Corinna Schmitt, Gabi Dreo Rodosek · elib (German Aerospace Center) · 2021
Growth of civil air traffic worldwide and new entrants such as Unmanned Aeronautical Vehicles (UAVs) pose a great challenge for the supporting Communication, Navigation and Surveillance (CNS) infrastructure. Analogue systems have to be replaced by digital means to optimize spectrum efficiency and automation is becoming much more important to be able to handle the amount of participants in the air traffic system. As safety and security are strongly intertwined in aviation, cybersecurity is one key enabler for digitalization in civil aviation. However, few deployed digital aeronautical communications system. Link requirements of low latency and low bandwidth make certificate based trust solutions costly, due to the comparatively high load of security data exchanged in a certificate based authenticated key exchange scheme. Thus, this paper proposes an alternative by introducing the challenge-response based Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) Mutual Authentication Key Exchange (PMAKE) scheme. Additionally, it is shown how a Keyless Signature Infrastructure (KSI) can be incorporated into the PMAKE scheme to secure the challenge-response pairs and anchor trust in a distributed way into the system.