Leveraging Social Contacts for Message Confidentiality in Delay Tolerant Networks

Delay and disruption tolerant networks (DTNs) can bring much-needed networking capabilities to developing countries and rural areas. DTN features such as high node mobility and infrequent interconnectivity make it challenging to obtain security services for messages exchanged between users. In particular, it is hard to pre-fetch credentials of peer users. Furthermore, multi-round protocols are difficult to implement due to unbounded delivery times. In this paper we present schemes where users leverage social contact information to establish shared cryptographic keys, thus facilitating secure messaging in DTNs.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: COMPSAC
• Authors: Karim M. El Defrawy, John Solis, Gene Tsudik
• Keywords: COMPSAC 2009, Disruption Tolerant Networks, Infrequent Interconnectivity, Much-needed Networking Capabilities, Software Engineering