Abstract: In a military tactical network, maintaining trust among members in a mission group is critical to successful mission completion. However, maintaining high trust among group members in a resource-restricted tactical environment is difficult, which may lead to mission failure or low mission effectiveness. In this paper, we propose a secure data retrieval scheme using CP-ABE. Cipher text-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) is a promising cryptographic solution to the access control issues for tactical network, where multiple key authorities manage their attributes independently. We demonstrate how to apply the proposed mechanism to securely and efficiently manage the confidential data distributed in the military tactical network.

Keywords: Group trust, tactical network, mission effectiveness, and key authorities.