P-MDTA: Multistage Trust Evolution Method for Physical Layer Satellite Link Authentication

Satellite communication (SatCom) links leveraging multisource physical layer features provide critical authentication technology for secure satellite networks. However, the existing physical layer security (PLS) schemes suffer two major limitations: 1) most methods perform one-shot decisions without tracking trust evolution over changing link geometries and 2) fixed decision rules fail to accumulate evidence and degrade robustness when spoofing parameters adapt. We propose a multistage dynamic trust authentication framework. First, we introduce a multifeature statistical detection module that performs real-time preliminary authentication based on Doppler shifts and power residual analysis. Then, we design a particle-filtering-based trust-state estimation mechanism that fuses historical credibility with new observations via adaptive resampling, enabling continuous trust evolution and swift anomaly response. Experiments on system tool kit (STK)-simulated datasets demonstrate that the proposed method increases secure throughput by 5.5% and reduces false-alarm and missed-detection rates by 27% and 29%, respectively.