Secure Many-to-Some Communications

A number of emerging military applications require that data be sent securely from a large group of source nodes ("many") to a smaller, possibly overlapping, set of destination nodes ("some"). In particular, the source nodes that are not also authorized data destinations in a secure many-to-some session must not be able to decrypt data from other sources. In this paper, we demonstrate that secure many-to-some communications can be achieved via group key agreement and public key cryptography. A number of applications for this novel communications modality are described including position location information (PLI) distribution in unclassified tactical radio networks.