Blockmesh Data Security and Trust Framework for Tactical Networks

This paper presents a blockmesh data security and trust framework for the tactical network environment that provides persistence, replication, and immutability of data on fully untrusted tactical networks, while supporting confidentiality, integrity, availability, and non-reputation. Blockmesh is related to, but different from, the blockchain concept. It discards the complexity and inefficiencies of blockchain consensus protocols and focuses on the problem of securing data instead of securing transactions. Each networked device maintains its own blockchain, and the interconnectedness of the blockchains in the blockmesh framework provides the same security guarantees as traditional blockchains – i.e., a large number (or all) of the nodes needs to be compromised before data/transactions can be maliciously modified or deleted without being detected. Consensus and verification are efficient and can be performed when excess resources are available or at the time of use for the data. The blockmesh framework is well suited to the operational characteristics of tactical networks. It provides important capabilities for historical data to be trusted and verifiable without assuming that any nodes are trusted. A prototype and use cases are presented.