Towards Trustworthy Cryptographic Protection of Airplane Information Assets

Digital signatures are emerging as accepted solutions for protecting aircraft assets during their storage and distribution over computer networks in aviation information systems (AIS). However, the design of trustworthy signature protocols that can address the unique challenges of AIS is an open problem. This paper presents candidate signature schemes that are able to address some of the major challenges, such as recovering from unanticipated loss of secrecy of signing keys and accommodating delegation of signing authority at ground entities interacting with aircraft. These schemes are shown to be computationally secure. Specifically, the paper proposes a generic construct for making standard signature schemes to be forward secure, ensuring that any exposure of the signing key does not lead to forgery and repudiation of signatures produced. Further, an extension of this construct is given for building forward secure proxy signature schemes that enable multiple authorized entities to assume the role of asset signer on behalf of, for example, an airline.