Mechanism for Secure Fault Tolerant Data Access in Disruption-Tolerant Networks

This paper presents the secure fault tolerant data access in Disruption-Tolerant networks using the mechanism multiauthority Ciphertext-Policy Attribute Based Encryption (CP-ABE) where each key authority manages the attributes independently. In military environments such as battlefield, there will be no proper network connectivity. Hence, Disruption-Tolerant Networks (DTN) is designed to provide communication in most unstable environment. To overcome the security issues such as enforcement of authorization policies and policies update, CP-ABE mechanism is used. The earlier single authority and multiple authorities CP-ABE mechanism had few disadvantages such as Attribute revocation, Key escrow problem and coordination of attribute keys issued from different authorities. These drawbacks are overcome in this paper. And also, when an authority fails or shutdowns, we demonstrate how securely and efficiently the data can be still accessed using Shamirs Secret Sharing mechanism.