Handling vulnerabilities with mobile agents in order to consider the delay and disruption tolerant characteristic of military networks

With the development of modern military warfare towards Network Centric Warfare (NCW), small mobile computers or devices that form tactical ad-hoc networks play an important role. These automatically established networks provide soldiers with information necessary to accomplish their mission. It has to be assumed that hostile forces manage to install malware on a mobile device by exploiting software vulnerabilities in order to spy out mission-specific information. Therefore, a vulnerability management in combination with a patch management is a pro-active countermeasure to improve network security. Most of the vulnerability and patch management systems use a Client-Server architecture. In this paper, we discuss the usage of Mobile Agents for this task. Through this approach, it is possible to consider the properties of military ad-hoc networks such as non-permanently existing end-to-end paths

Automatic multicast IPsec by using a proactive IPsec discovery protocol and a group key management

Internet protocol based networking is gaining ground in armed forces, leading to a concept described by the NATO as network centric capabilities (NCC). The goal is to enable state-of-the-art, affordable and powerful electronic information services to the troops. A tighter connection of the forces is expected to further enhance the joined strike capabilities. Providing secure information exchange within groups of armed forces is one aspect of the NCC concept. Such group communication is enabled by the multicast feature of the IP technology. Security requirements are met by using the IP security (IPsec) architecture. IPsec enables secure communication between secure private networks via an unsecured public text network. While secure unicast transmission with IPsec is common, only few achievements have been made to secure multicast transmissions. The protection of multicast data traffic of a group in an automated way is described in this document. We utilize an automatic detection of IPsec devices and an efficient key management protocol to reach our aim