DECENTRALIZED DISRUPTION-TOLERANT MILITARY NETWORKS WITH SECURE DATA RETRIEVAL SCHEME USING CP-ABE

Disruption-tolerant network (DTN) technologies are becoming successful solutions that allow nodes to communicate with each other in these extreme networking environments. Typically, when there is no end-to-end connection between a source and a destination pair, the messages from the source node may need to wait in the intermediate nodes for a substantial amount of time until the connection would be eventually established. Some of the most challenging issues in this scenario are the enforcement of authorization policies and the policies update for secure data retrieval. Ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) is a promising cryptographic solution to the access control issues. However, the problem of applying CP-ABE in decentralized DTNs introduces several security and privacy challenges with regard to the attribute revocation, key escrow, and coordination of attributes issued from different authorities. In this abstract, we propose a se-cure data retrieval scheme using CP-ABE for decentralized DTNs where multiple key authorities manage their attributes independently. We demonstrate how to apply the proposed mechanism to securely and efficiently manage the confidential data distributed in the disruption-tolerant military network.