ODON: An On-Demand Security Overlay for Mission-Critical Applications

In this paper we consider the construction of a large-scale, highly available and secure overlay network to enable mission-critical communication between emergency personnel at a disaster area and their coordinating agencies across the Internet. This network is designed to be secure against network-based failures and external attacks including denial of service (DoS) attacks. We design several protocols for the effective operation of the network, including protocols for user access verification and the establishment of session credentials between the user and the target server. We verify these protocols theoretically for their security and evaluate the overall performance of the system with a combination of simulation and implementation.