A three-tier damage-driven security infrastructure for mission continuity

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks are one of the core enabling technologies for tactical environments such as those envisioned in future military operations and disaster relief scenarios. While a significant amount of research has focused on technology interoperability and protocol design, there has been less work addressing the security and information assurance requirements for such environments. Properly identifying and satisfying these requirements will be mandatory for successful deployment in a hostile cyberspace. This paper describes BITSI (Biologically-Inspired Tactical Security Infrastructure), our approach to provide MANET security with focus on mission continuity. Our measure of success is the completion of the mission (or missions) within pre-defined QoS requirements, as opposed to the protection of a single machine. After a brief discussion of the theoretical principals involved in BITSI, we describe the proposed security mechanism and system architecture.