A study on the integrity and authentication of weather observation data using Identity Based Encryption

Abstract

Weather information provides a safe working environment by contributing to the economic activity of the nation, and plays role of the prevention of natural disasters, which can cause large scaled casualties and damage of property. Especially during times of war, weather information plays a more important role than strategy, tactics and information about trends of the enemy. Also, it plays an essential role for the taking off and landing of fighter jet and the sailing of warships. If weather information, which plays a major role in national security and economy, gets misused for cyber terrorism resulting false weather information, it could be a huge threat for national security and the economy. We propose a plan to safely transmit the measured value from meteorological sensors through a meteorological telecommunication network in order to guarantee the confidentiality and integrity of the data despite cyber-attacks. Also, such a plan allows one to produce reliable weather forecasts by performing mutual authentication through authentication devices. To make sure of this, one can apply an Identity Based Signature to ensure the integrity of measured data, and transmit the encrypted weather information with mutual authentication about the authentication devices. There are merits of this research: It is not necessary to manage authentication certificates unlike the Public Key Infrastructure methodology, and it provides a powerful security measure with the capability to be realized in a small scale computing environment, such as the meteorological observation system due to the low burden on managing keys.