Practical security for disconnected nodes

  • Authors:
  • Aaditeshwar Seth;Srinivasan Keshav

  • Affiliations:
  • School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Canada;School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Canada

  • Venue:
  • NPSEC'05 Proceedings of the First international conference on Secure network protocols
  • Year:
  • 2005

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Endpoints in a delay tolerant network (DTN) [5] must deal with long periods of disconnection, large end-to-end communication delays, and opportunistic communication over intermittent links. This makes traditional security mechanisms inefficient and sometimes unsuitable. We study three specific problems that arise naturally in this context: initiation of a secure channel by a disconnected user using an opportunistic connection, mutual authentication over an opportunistic link, and protection of disconnected users from attacks initiated by compromised identities. We propose a security architecture for DTN based on Hierarchical Identity Based Cryptography (HIBC) that provides efficient and practical solutions to these problems.