Secure group communications for Delay-Tolerant Networks

The increased demand for mobile communication and use of mobile devices in high-latency, resource impoverished environments has spurred the development and growth of Delay-Tolerant Networks (DTN). DTNs aim to provide interoperability between a range of heterogeneous networks, operating under resource-constrained circumstances and traditional infrastructure networks such as the Internet. Because of the circumstances, DTNs possess some interesting characteristics that make a traditional end-to-end security paradigm unsuitable and increase the value of the overlay's resources. Controlling access to overlay resources and providing for secure group communications over unknown intermediate networks is essential. We propose a novel solution based on previous work in secure group communications using key-graphs and in extension to work on scalable access authorization in self-organizing overlays to provide a scalable mechanism for access control and secure group communications in DTNs. Since resources are especially limited, our implementation focuses on minimizing the traffic on the overlay associated with the maintenance of our solution.