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
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