Secure DTN Communications

The potential use of Secure DTN for NASA applications is significant. Security of space missions has become a major challenge on a national and international level. Secure DTN will provide a strong framework that will be deployed on-board space missions, at ground stations and end user terminals. The framework will be able to protect sensitive and classified information, manned life support systems, and intellectual property. Economic pressure continues to push missions toward reuse of existing ground and space assets. International collaboration is also encouraged in order to reduce costs. The proposed framework is a solution that meets these goals by enabling non-conventional communication architectures to be implemented without compromising data privacy and integrity.

The potential use of Secure DTN for non NASA applications is promising for commercial, U.S. government, and DoD applications. Commercial missions are under pressure to bring mission costs down while the need to bring more data down continues to rise. Secure DTN can protect data communications using a variety of affordable data relays such as geosynchronous spacecraft and store and forward orbiters. Further, secure IP-based communications is a highly desired solution for disaggregate architecture like hosted payload. Net-centric operations and data fusion are important concepts for the DoD in the modern battle field. Secure DTN is an excellent approach for "systems of systems" in which in-theater data collectors need to push data back to homeland or remote operations centers securely. The proposed technology can be deployed on space, air, and ground systems. More importantly it can fuse all those systems together. More »