Anonymity and security in delay tolerant networks

Abstract

A delay tolerant network (DTN) is a store and forward network where end-to-end connectivity is not assumed and where opportunistic links between nodes are used to transfer data. An emerging application of DTNs are rural area DTNs, which provide Internet connectivity to rural areas in developing regions using conventional transportation mediums, like buses. Potential applications of these rural area DTNs are e-governance, telemedicine and citizen journalism. Therefore, security and privacy are critical for DTNs. Traditional cryptographic techniques based on PKI-certified public keys assume continuous network access, which makes these techniques inapplicable to DTNs because of their disconnected nature. We present the first anonymous communication solution for DTNs and introduce a new anonymous authentication protocol as part of it. Furthermore, we present a security infrastructure for DTNs to provide efficient secure communication. Our anonymity and security solutions are based on identity-based cryptography. We show that our solutions have better performance than previously proposed security infrastructures for DTNs. * Research supported by an NSERC PGS-D postgraduate scholarship 1. We introduce a new, IBC-based, anonymous authentication protocol and use this protocol to build the first system for providing anonymous communication in DTNs. 2. We present an IBC-based security infrastructure for DTNs that is more efficient than an existing security infrastructure for DTNs [25]. We provide an overview of DTNs and IBC in Section 2. In Section 3, we discuss related work in the area of DTN security and anonymous communication. In Section 4, we present our architecture for secure DTN communication. Section 5 describes our new anonymous authentication protocol and our anonymity architecture, which, as it turns out, can be integrated into our security architecture with no changes in the setup. This anonymity architecture forms the basis for anonymous and secure communication in DTNs, which we discuss in Section 6. Section 7 investigates system and network-related issues, like performance, routing and billing. In Appendix A, we briefly introduce bilinear pairings and the bilinear Diffie-Hellman problem. We discuss the security and anonymity provided by our anonymous authentication protocol in Appendix B. 2 Background In this section, we give a survey of DTNs and the special case of rural area DTNs. We also review an IBC scheme, namely the Sakai-Ohgishi-Kasahara key agreement protocol [24] in a Boneh-Franklin identity-based encryption setup [5]. Finally, we give an overview of hierarchical identity-based cryptography (HIBC). 2.1 Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) DTNs deal with communication in extreme and performance-challenged environments, where continuous end-to-end connectivity cannot be assumed. In a DTN, nodes use opportunistic connectivity over intermittent links for communication. Such opportunistic links are generally provided by mobile routers. They offer connectivity by acting as "data mules" to carry data to and fr...

Data Dissemination in Mobile Social Networks with the Acknowledgment Feedback

“…They would not forge information to other nodes, or hide the messages that they carried. The security-related problems are out of the scope of this paper, and there exist some strong authentication schemes [26,27] that provide the verification of information.…”

An investigation on the unwillingness of nodes to participate in mobile delay tolerant network routing

“…Kate et al [22] presented an anonymous communication architecture for DTNs using Identity-Based Cryptography (IBC) [49]. This is one of the first anonymous communication solutions specifically for DTNs.…”

“…However, node groups are randomly clustered, which may result in the inefficient dissemination of messages inside a group. In addition, the assumption of a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) rarely holds in MDTNs [22].…”

Personal Satellite Services

“…However, the above traditional solution for anonymity does not work in DTN because of the disconnected nature and routing strategy of DTN. With opportunistic and variable delays source routing is not always possible [22]. In DTN, there is no complete routing topology so Onion Routing (OR) does not work because OR needs to know the route in advance and encrypt the message accordingly for each router on the path.…”