Abstract: Authentication is an important point of satellite network security. On the premise of security, it is one of the research hot spots that how to design efficient authentication scheme according to the ability of satellite network. Nowadays, researches about authentication scheme of LEO satellite network mainly focus on reducing the calculation consumption with low cost computation, like Hash operation, while ignoring the features of LEO satellite network like dynamic topology and frequent link switch etc. On the other hand, the consensus mechanism of blockchain is drawing more and more attention. Through the consensus mechanism, internal nodes of network reach a consensus and confirm the synchronization of transactions among the whole network. Based on these, a regional cooperative authentication protocol is proposed, which makes LEO network dynamic topology abstract with regional division and implements efficient handover authentication by consensus among satellites. Additionally, the proposed protocol reaches the fast switch by combining the method of distributed Hash table and Hash lock, which are light in computation and can avoid the defect that each authentication with normal authentication way is a brand new authentication phase. For the security and performance, a contrastive analysis to relevant researches in these years is made. At last, the protocol is simulated with a LEO network scenario similar to Iridium system upon OPNET network stimulation platform. And the results of simulation show that the performance of the protocol is obviously superior to existing authentication protocols in satellite network.

Key words: consensus mechanism, LEO satellite network, access authentication, distributed Hash table, regional division