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<!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC "-//NLM//DTD JATS (Z39.96) Journal Publishing DTD v1.0 20120330//EN" "JATS-journalpublishing1.dtd"><article xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" article-type="research-article"><front><journal-meta><journal-id journal-id-type="publisher-id">INFORMATICA</journal-id><journal-title-group><journal-title>Informatica</journal-title></journal-title-group><issn pub-type="epub">0868-4952</issn><issn pub-type="ppub">0868-4952</issn><publisher><publisher-name>VU</publisher-name></publisher></journal-meta><article-meta><article-id pub-id-type="publisher-id">INF13308</article-id><article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.3233/INF-2002-13308</article-id><article-categories><subj-group subj-group-type="heading"><subject>Research article</subject></subj-group></article-categories><title-group><article-title>Cryptanalysis and Improvement of Key Distribution System for VSAT Satellite Communications<xref ref-type="fn" rid="fn1"><sup>✩</sup></xref></article-title></title-group><contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="Author"><name><surname>Tseng</surname><given-names>Yuh-Min</given-names></name><email xlink:href="mailto:tym@nkc.edu.tw">tym@nkc.edu.tw</email><xref ref-type="aff" rid="j_INFORMATICA_aff_000"/></contrib><aff id="j_INFORMATICA_aff_000">Department of Information Management, Nan-Kai College, Nantou, Taiwan 542, R.O.C</aff></contrib-group><author-notes><fn id="fn1"><label><sup>✩</sup></label><p>This research was partially supported by National Science Council, Taiwan, R.O.C., under contract no. NSC89-2213-E-252-008.</p></fn></author-notes><pub-date pub-type="epub"><day>01</day><month>01</month><year>2002</year></pub-date><volume>13</volume><issue>3</issue><fpage>369</fpage><lpage>376</lpage><history><date date-type="received"><day>01</day><month>06</month><year>2002</year></date></history><abstract><p>Recently, Park and Lim (1998) proposed two key distribution systems for secure VSAT satellite communications. One provides indirect authentication, and another scheme enables that two parties can directly authenticate each other. However, this article will show that the proposed schemes are insecure enough by presenting two impersonation attacks on them. Besides, an improved scheme will be proposed, which is secure against the impersonation attack and provides direct mutual authentication between two parties.</p></abstract><kwd-group><label>Keywords</label><kwd>satellite communication</kwd><kwd>key distribution</kwd><kwd>cryptanalysis</kwd></kwd-group></article-meta></front></article>