Securing Delay-Tolerant Networks with BPSec
by Edward J. Birrane, III, Sarah Heiner, Ken McKeever
Foreword
I have been involved with computer and network security since 1975 after I received my undergraduate degree in electrical and computer engineering. Back then computer security was a fledgling profession primarily concerned with processing data of multiple classification levels simultaneously (i.e. multilevel security). Likewise, network security, in the ARPAnet days with the few attached computer systems running the Network Control Program (NCP) prior to the deployment of TCP/IP, was primarily concerned with the ability to ensure data confidentiality from sender to receiver. As the ARPAnet begat the MILnet which in turn begat the NSFnet and TCP/IP replaced NCP, the worldwide Internet explosion took place and networking evolved to what we know it to be today. I became involved with security for space with an early effort to use Internet protocols (e.g. TCP, IP, FTP) for space missions. An outgrowth of the Internet Protocols (IPs) in space was the Interplanetary Internet (IPN) and what we now know as the Bundle Protocol (BP) and its associated Bundle Protocol Security (BPSec). As one of the most exciting projects in my career, I worked on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) team that architected the IPN/DTN and specifically, the security architecture and the security protocol.
In the early 1990s, while the Internet was beginning its world-wide growth using a standard protocol stack, the space communications community was still using decades old link layer protocol standards ...