Secure Content Based Routing in Tactical Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Information superiority in future network centric warfare requires bandwidth efficient data dissemination to the right person at the right time with high assurance. This paper presents a secure content based routing approach for information dissemination in tactical networks. In this approach, subscription is expressed in terms of information items. This approach is more general and flexible than dissemination based on multicast addresses, and avoids the problem of pre-deployment multicast address planning for dynamic engagement situations in battle fields. To be bandwidth efficient, the proposed approach establishes routing paths taking into account overlapping information needs of different nodes. Secure dissemination is founded on a novel concept that separates the concerns of key management for trusted communication (entitlement grouping) from that of disseminating only specific information items that are of interest to recipients (dissemination grouping). The proposed approach provides an integrated scheme that facilitates entitlement based key management for protecting contents in packet payloads and content markup in packet headers for content based routing. The content markup enables intermediate forwarding nodes to employ efficient bandwidth utilization techniques without examining packet contents, thus reducing security vulnerabilities