Secure Opportunistic Data Retrievals in Challenged Environments

Mobile nodes in some challenging network scenarios suffer from intermittent connectivity and frequent partitions e.g. battlefield and disaster recovery scenarios. Disruption tolerant network (DTN) technologies are designed to enable nodes in such environments to communicate with one another. Several DTN routing schemes have been proposed. However, very few work has been done on providing information access in such challenging network scenarios. In an earlier work, we studied information retrieval schemes for single-attribute queries in DTNs. Our schemes disseminate replicated data copies and queries to local-neighborhood. To deploy such a system, security issues need to be dealt with. In this paper, we describe a data-centric security solution for opportunistic data retrievals in challenged environments. We first describe our solution, then we describe a preliminary implementation that we have built.