SecOMN: Improved security approach for Opportunistic Mobile Networks using cyber foraging

摘要

Opportunistic Mobile Networks (OMN) interpret the social characteristics of human beings for message routing in hostile environment or rural areas. The concept of cyber foraging provides mobile nodes the ability to offload the computationally intensive tasks to the nearest data center or cloudlets instead of offloading the requests to Wide Area Networks (WAN). The cloudlets are the major components of the cyber foraging environment. The cloudlets have mobile as well as fixed states. Most opportunistic mobile networks rely on the participating nodes for the purpose of providing security. This makes the security model heterogeneous and computationally more intensive for the nodes. The goal is to have a greater level of security while decreasing the power consumption of the nodes at the same time. This work proposes a Secured Opportunistic Mobile Network (SecOMN) which uses cloudlets to address the issues of intensive computation and security. We assume the scenario in which the cloudlets are in hostile environments and as such have very limited Internet connectivity. The goal of increased level of security is met by the introduction of a hybrid encryption algorithm that combines both symmetric and asymmetric key encryption systems in an intuitive manner. The system also takes care of the integrity and authenticity of the transmitted packets. It is found that the proposed model is successfully able to reduce the computations performed at the nodes by a large extent. Further, the concept of cyber foraging enables the implementation of a more complex security model which has been analyzed to be significantly secure against all known attacks.