A distributed zero-trust scheme for airborne wireless sensor networks using dynamic identity authentication

With the continuous development of Airborne Wireless Sensor Networks (AWSN) in airplane monitoring systems, security isolation is facing increasingly serious insider threats. Due to the real-time bi-directional data exchange, attackers can exploit compromised nodes as the springboard to infiltrate the aircraft control domain and airline information services domain, thus stealing sensitive data or doing damage. However, existing zero-trust schemes have centralized deployment bottlenecks and static identity authentication problems, so it is difficult to combat insider threats caused by compromised nodes in the AWSN environments. In this paper, we propose a distributed zero-trust scheme with dynamic identity authentication called DzTrust in airborne wireless sensor networks. Distributed cross-domain deployment of zero-trust engines around dense AWSN nodes can decentralize the zero-trust processing load of centralized deployment. A lightweight Certificateless Aggregation Signcryption (CLASC) model suitable for AWSN is constructed to ensure the secure transmission of information flow. Meanwhile, we maintain a Regularized Behaviors Data Blockchain (RBD_chain) to securely store the behavioral data of AWSN nodes, which facilitates traceability and prevents information tampering. Incorporating dynamic trust evaluation with certificateless authentication, a dynamic identity authentication method is designed, which effectively identifies and mitigates compromised nodes. Security analysis shows that the DzTrust scheme has high security against eavesdropping attack, replay attack, impersonation attack, and man in the middle attack. Performance analysis shows that the DzTrust scheme has good performance in identifying compromised nodes, as well as high computational and communication efficiency.