Security for Wireless Handheld Devices

The XPRT Solutions,Inc./New Jersey Institute of Technology /Network Security Solutions, Inc. (XNN) team proposes to prototype the Locally Enforced Global Trust (LEGT) strong authentication technique for handheld wireless devices in a Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) or in a Future Combat System (FCS) environment. MANET/FCS nodes can operate in a decentralized "trust no peer" mode that complicates and inhibits security services. Phase I is used to refine the design of LEGT, whereas Phase II will develop a prototype, then test and evaluate its performance against realistic red-team scenarios using our laboratory testbed that also emulates Future Combat Systems (FCS) scenarios among others. The XNN team has constructed and tested successfully a solution architecture to the provision of security in MANETs that is based on a "neighborhood watch" concept. LEGT utilizes this architectural approach, along with known successful principles of authentication that include self-organized PKI with certificate chains over clusters, threshold cryptography with localized trust, distributed trust, and cluster based key management, thus building a fully decentralized scalable strong authentication policy.