Achieving Secure On-Orbit Comparison in LEO-Satellite-Enabled Offshore Wind Farm Surveillance

The low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellation holds immense potential for offshore wind farm surveillance since it can provide all-day and all-weather monitoring capabilities facilitated by satellite collaboration. However, it faces significant challenges. First, limited downlink transmission bandwidth constrained by ground stations and constraint on-orbit resources necessitate selective data downloads, focusing only on differences between consecutive data sets. Second, a passively injected satellite in open space poses a risk of unauthorized data extraction from neighboring satellites. Third, onboard energy constraints limit the feasibility of computationally intensive cryptographic operations. To tackle these challenges for the first time, we propose a novel secure and efficient on-orbit comparison (SEOC) scheme. Our solution begins with introducing a lightweight matrix encryption-based secure inner product (MSIP) technique tailored for secure on-orbit comparison. We further enhance communication efficiency by integrating a Cuckoo filter to reduce costs, complementing a novel difference comparison tree (DCTree) structure to manage false positives. Through comprehensive security analysis, the MSIP technique achieves selective security, and the SEOC scheme is secure under the universally composable (UC) framework. At last, performance evaluations demonstrate the high efficiency of our approach in terms of computational costs and communication overheads, which adapts to the limited on-orbit resources.