HTTP-DTNSec: An HTTP-Based Security Extension for Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking

Communication networks operating in challenging environments can be grouped by the concept of Delay/Disruption-Tolerant Networking (DTN). Different protocols can be used in DTN, such as the Bundle Protocol (BP) and the HyperText Transfer Protocol - DTN (HTTP-DTN). In this context, security properties are of fundamental importance in DTN like in regular networks. However, the challenges in DTN hamper the use of traditional security mechanisms. Although BP has been extended to include such mechanisms, there is still no analogous extension for HTTP-DTN. In this paper, we propose the HTTP-DTNSec, a security extension for HTTP-DTN. This extension improves the confidentiality and integrity of HTTP-DTN as well as updates the base protocol for HTTP/2. The proposed extension was implemented as a proof of concept and it was used to perform experiments in a simulated environment. These experiments show that HTTP-DTNSec performed the transfer of packages (i.e., a group of related objects) in a safe manner and with an increase in performance concerning HTTP-DTN. Finally, we provide some concluding remarks and future directions.