Fault-tolerance Authentication and Secure Key Management in Mobile Environments

Survivability and secure communications are essential in a mobile computing environment. In a secure network, all the hosts must be authenticated before communicating, and failure of agents that authenticate the hosts may detach the hosts from rest of the network. Working on techniques to eliminate such a single point of failure and also to identify various security threats and performance issues in group communications in mobile computing environments and also exploiting tools like NS2 to generate large topologies and simulate the scenarios.

Communication systems for the digital battlefield are highly mobile and create highly dynamic network topologies (mobile ad-hoc networks). Wireless network architectures with fixed base stations are not able to adapt to dynamic movements. The moving components include mobile hosts, mobile base stations (mobile routers/agents), mobile subnets, and even an intranet. In a battlefield, for example, as troops move from one place to another, their communication network should move with them as well. Mobile nodes in such mobile networks are capable of communicating on the move. In such an environment, fixed base stations are attractive targets, therefore, highly vulnerable. A destruction of a base station will disrupt communication sessions. Hence, there is a need for an effective mobile computing system, which is adaptable to such attack. For tactical military networks, we can mount base stations on mobile platforms like helicopters and tanks. As the troops move these platforms, networks move with them and provide continuous services to their infantry (mobile hosts).

We propose techniques for providing uninterrupted service to the mobile hosts which still allowing the service agents to move or fail in an ad-hoc fashion. Our approach need no update of routing tables, avoid communication delays and does not impose security threats. We proposed two different schemes for achieving fault-tolerant secure authentication. One using Virtual Home Agent and the other uses hierarchical tree structure.

Resercher

Dr. Sanjay Madria

Vishnu Deepak Batthula

Dr. Bharat Bhargava, Purdue University