Leveraging Social Contacts for Message Confidentiality in Delay Tolerant Networks

Delay- and Disruption-Tolerant Networks (DTNs) can bring much-needed connectivity to rural areas and other settings with limited or non-existing infrastructures. High node mobility and infrequent connectivity inherent to DTNs make it challenging to implement simple and traditional security services, e.g., message integrity and confidentiality. In this paper, the authors focus on the problem of initial secure context establishment in DTNs. Concretely, they design a scheme that allows users to leverage social contact information to exchange confidential and authentic messages. They then evaluate the proposed scheme by analyzing real-world social network data, simulating communication scenarios, and through an informal security analysis.