DARPA G409/J175 Survivable Real-Time Network Services
University of Delaware
Fortnight Activity Report (FAR)
10 June 2002

As this is the first of a continuing series of fortnightly reports, a short introduction to our activities is in order. We are a small project studying technology for autonomous service providers in a hostile ad-hoc networking environment, such as a remote sensor network or forward tactical battle network. There are two requirements central to our study, to securely authenticate participants to each other using strong cryptography and to self-organize hierarchical services using adaptive multicast techniques. There have been no major developments in either of these areas during the last fortnight.

Our contribution to the strong cryptography requirement is a scheme which avoids clogging hazards by using conventional PKI cryptography only very rarely and at other times preserving the security binding using pseudo-random hashing sequences. The scheme is called Autokey and is described in an Internet Draft to be submitted as RFC. A poof of concept implementation has been built for the Network Time Protocol. A set of briefing slides and related information is at http://eecis.udel.edu/~mills/autokey.htm.

Our contribution to the self-organize hierarchical services requirement is a set of heuristic optimization algorithms which adapt the width and height of the subnet tree dynamically in response to new and expired service nodes, changing network dynamics and hostile attack. Optimization criteria include Byzantine methods to deflect intruders, iterative clustering algorithms to select reliable servers and expanding ring searches for server discovery. A poof of concept implementation has been built for the Network Time Protocol. A set of briefing slides and related information is at http://eecis.udel.edu/~mills/autocfg.htm.

We have two other activities that provide mutual support. With funding from JPL/NASA we are working on adapting the Network Time Protocol for interplanetary space missions, specifically for Mars exploration. This activity is reported at http://eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ipin.htm. With funding from ARL we are working on a multivariate trust model with applications to Autokey. This activity is reported at http://eecis.udel.edu/~mills/cta.htm.

Dave Mills sends