Secure distributed storage for information dissemination and retrieval at the tactical edge

Information (and its timely delivery) has always been one of the most critical tactical assets. Today, we have the technology to deploy data collection and retrieval systems all the way from mission headquarters down to the lowest levels of echelon. Due to the lower echelons proximity to the adversary, protecting the information is one of the most important issues in designing such systems. In this paper, we describe a secure distributed storage scheme to be used especially at and near the tactical edge. The scheme does so through a peer-to-peer overlay and storage protocol designed to run on existing networked systems. We utilize a structured overlay that is dynamically organized in a layered, hierarchical manner based on the existing military command structure (e.g. fire-team, squad, battalion, etc.). These layers are used as storage sites for pieces of data near the layer at which that data is needed. The data is generated and distributed via an information dispersal algorithm (IDA) utilizing an erasure code such as the common Cauchy Reed-Solomon (RS). Through the use of this IDA, the data pieces are organized across neighboring layers to maximize locality. This organization also prevents a compromise within one layer from compromising data in that layer. Multiple layers would have to be compromised for a single datum to become compromised. As a result, both security and survivability of the data is improved compared to the typical remote server-client model. We present an overview of this approach along with our experimental results on hardware performance of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) mobile devices. The recorded overhead (encoding/ decoding times and associated data sizes) show that such a scheme can be utilized with little increase in overall latency.