Secure Command and Control for Internet of Battle Things Using Novel Network Paradigms

Abstract

Current military operations require flexible and adaptable troops, which must be able to cooperate with civilian agencies and coalitions in open field and urban scenarios. These challenges require informed decisions not only at headquarters, but also at the edge of the battlefield, together with networkenabled skills and agile Command and Control (C2) Systems. The C2 system should ensure a timely and secure dissemination of information, obtained from interconnected devices, such as radars, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), sensors, armored combat vehicles and wearable devices. These networked sensors and effectors constitute the Internet of Battle Things (IoBT). This work investigates a secure network strategy to achieve C2 agility in the IoBT heterogeneous environment, by coupling the application and network with a multi-layer, defense-indepth cybersecurity mechanism at the hardware, network and application level. The planned framework uses the Software- Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm to orchestrate network services, by means of semantics-oriented data from technologies such as Information Centric Networks (ICN) and Delay-Tolerant Networks (DTN). The results from preliminary simulated scenarios showed a significant improvement in network metrics, as well as network resilience to withstand cyber-attacks.