Cryptographic Protocol for Multipart Missions Involving Two Independent and Distributed Decision Levels in a Military Context

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new cryptographic protocol designed for complex military missions involving multiple independent decision levels, ensuring security properties like secrecy, authentication, and resistance to attacks in insecure networks.

Contribution

It presents a novel secure protocol tailored for multipart military missions with two independent decision levels, addressing multiple security properties simultaneously.

Findings

Ensures secrecy, authentication, and non-repudiation.

Resists man-in-the-middle attacks.

Suitable for insecure network communications.

Abstract

In several critical military missions, more than one decision level are involved. These decision levels are often independent and distributed, and sensitive pieces of information making up the military mission must be kept hidden from one level to another even if all of the decision levels cooperate to accomplish the same task. Usually, a mission is negotiated through insecure networks such as the Internet using cryptographic protocols. In such protocols, few security properties have to be ensured. However, designing a secure cryptographic protocol that ensures several properties at once is a very challenging task. In this paper, we propose a new secure protocol for multipart military missions that involve two independent and distributed decision levels having different security levels. We show that it ensures the secrecy, authentication, and non-repudiation properties. In addition, we show that it resists against man-in-the-middle attacks.