Mu Dtnsec: A Security Layer For Disruption-Tolerant Networks On Microcontrollers

We introduce mu DTNSec, the first fully-implemented security layer for Delay/Disruption-Tolerant Networks (DTN) on microcontrollers. It provides protection against eavesdropping and Man-in-the-Middle attacks that are especially easy in these networks. Following the Store-Carry-Forward principle of DTNs, an attacker can simply place itself on the route between source and destination. Our design consists of asymmetric encryption and signatures with Elliptic Curve Cryptography and hardwarebacked symmetric encryption with the Advanced Encryption Standard. mu DTNSec has been fully implemented as an extension to mu DTN on Contiki OS and is based on the Bundle Protocol specification. Our performance evaluation shows that the choice of the curve (secp128r1, secp192r1, secp256r1) dominates the influence of the payload size. We also provide energy measurements for all operations to show the feasibility of our security layer on energy-constrained devices.