Authentic Data Access Scheme for Variant Disruption-Tolerant Networks

Abstract

Mobile nodes in military environments such as a battlefield or a hostile region are likely to suffer from intermittent network connectivity and frequent partitions. Disruption-tolerant network (DTN) technologies are becoming successful solutions that allow wireless devices carried by soldiers to communicate with each other and access the confidential information or command reliably by exploiting external storage nodes. 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 paper, we propose a secure 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. Since some users may change their associated attributes at some point (for example, moving their region), or some private keys might be compromised, key revocation (or update) for each attribute is necessary in order to make systems secure. This implies that revocation of any attribute or any single user in an attribute group would affect the other users in the group. It may result in bottleneck during rekeying procedure, or security degradation due to the windows of vulnerability if the previous attribute key is not updated immediately.