Securing Data for Space Communications

NASA's vision of data exchange between space and ground nodes would involve the space network accessing public infrastructure such as the internet. Hence, advanced security measures have to be developed to ensure information integrity and authentication. The proposed innovations in this work are 1) A hierachical security model, where each level has a different security requirement and varying capabilities (such as power and ad hoc measure), 2) An adaptive key management protocol suite that would cater to the security needs of the network at the various levels, and 3) A novel key management scheme that uses threshold cryptography and group key management concepts. The significance of our approach is to provide a key management solution that provides strong authentication and data integrity, a solution that is flexible and can be adapted according to different security requirements and capabilities of the network and a scheme that considers the performance capabilities of the participating nodes and provides solutions accordingly.