Scalable key management for tactical swarms

Abstract

Swarming is a powerful pattern allowing reliable, efficient, and economical task execution, identified as a key military technology by the Department of Defense. However, despite expectations that this evolving space will grow to encompass a diverse set of military and civil applications, minimal consideration has been given to the design or integration of schemes providing flexible and efficient secure group communication for tactical swarms. In remedy, we survey relevant literature to provide a top-down, coherent story for secure swarm and UxS communication, with emphasis on cryptographic key management. We propose a taxonomy of swarm needs, identify candidate key management schemes, extend a key management architecture via scalability considerations, and begin a prototype of the augmented architecture.