A Secure and Efficient Communications Architecture for Global Information Grid Users via Cooperating Space Assets

With the Information Age in full and rapid development, users expect to have global, seamless, ubiquitous, secure, and efficient communications capable of providing access to real-time applications and collaboration. The United States Department of Defense’s (DoD) Network-Centric Enterprise Services initiative, along with the notion of pushing the “power to the edge,” aims to provide end-users with maximum situational awareness, a comprehensive view of the battlespace, all within a secure networking environment. Building from previous AFIT research efforts, this research developed a novel security framework architecture to address the lack of efficient and scalable secure multicasting in the low earth orbit satellite network environment. This security framework architecture combines several key aspects of different secure group communications architectures in a new way that increases efficiency and scalability, while maintaining the overall system security level. By implementing this security architecture in a deployed environment with heterogeneous communications users, reduced re-keying frequency will result. Less frequent re-keying means more resources are available for throughput as compared to security overhead. This translates to more transparency to the end user; it will seem as if they have a “larger pipe” for their network links. As a proof of concept, this research developed and analyzed multiple mobile communication environment scenarios to demonstrate the superior re-keying advantage offered by the novel “Hubenko Security Framework Architecture” over traditional and clustered multicast security architectures. For example, in the scenario containing a heterogeneous mix of user types (Stationary, Ground, Sea, and Air), the Hubenko Architecture achieved a minimum ten-fold reduction in total keys distributed as compared to other known architectures. Another experiment demonstrated the Hubenko Architecture operated at 6% capacity while the other architectures operated at 98% capacity. In the 80% overall mobility experiment with 40% Air users, the other architectures re-keying increased 900% over the Stationary case, whereas the Hubenko Architecture only increased 65%. This new architecture is extensible to numerous secure group communications environments beyond the low earth orbit satellite network environment, including unmanned aerial vehicle swarms, wireless sensor networks, and mobile ad hoc networks

A Survey on Wireless Sensor Network Security

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have recently attracted a lot of interest in the research community due their wide range of applications. Due to distributed nature of these networks and their deployment in remote areas, these networks are vulnerable to numerous security threats that can adversely affect their proper functioning. This problem is more critical if the network is deployed for some mission-critical applications such as in a tactical battlefield. Random failure of nodes is also very likely in real-life deployment scenarios. Due to resource constraints in the sensor nodes, traditional security mechanisms with large overhead of computation and communication are infeasible in WSNs. Security in sensor networks is, therefore, a particularly challenging task. This paper discusses the current state of the art in security mechanisms for WSNs. Various types of attacks are discussed and their countermeasures presented. A brief discussion on the future direction of research in WSN security is also included.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figures, 2 table

Host mobility key management in dynamic secure group communication

The key management has a fundamental role in securing group communications taking place over vast and unprotected networks. It is concerned with the distribution and update of the keying materials whenever any changes occur in the group membership. Wireless mobile environments enable members to move freely within the networks, which causes more difficulty to design efficient and scalable key management protocols. This is partly because both member location dynamic and group membership dynamic must be managed concurrently, which may lead to significant rekeying overhead. This paper presents a hierarchical group key management scheme taking the mobility of members into consideration intended for wireless mobile environments. The proposed scheme supports the mobility of members across wireless mobile environments while remaining in the group session with minimum rekeying transmission overhead. Furthermore, the proposed scheme alleviates 1-affect-n phenomenon, single point of failure, and signaling load caused by moving members at the core network. Simulation results shows that the scheme surpasses other existing efforts in terms of communication overhead and affected members. The security requirements studies also show the backward and forward secrecy is preserved in the proposed scheme even though the members move between areas