Authenticated and Resilient Communication for Distributed Black Wall Systems

Problem statement

Investigate how distributed Black Wall machines and robotic nodes can communicate securely while limiting the impact of compromised nodes, interrupted connectivity, and unauthorized commands.

Why it matters

A distributed system is only as trustworthy as its weakest node. Without explicit identities, authorisation and failure handling, one compromised or disconnected node can issue commands that the rest of the system accepts.

Research questions

1. 01 How are node identities established, and what trust relationships exist between them?
2. 02 Which operations require mutual authentication, and how should credentials be distributed?
3. 03 How can authorisation for remote operations survive a compromised peer?
4. 04 What should happen during replay attempts, credential rotation, revocation and disconnected operation?

Research objectives

• Define node identities and trust relationships.
• Evaluate mutually authenticated communication.
• Implement authorization policies for remote operations.
• Investigate replay protection, credential rotation, and revocation.
• Test communication failures and disconnected operation.

Technical challenges

• Identity provisioning has to work before a trustworthy network exists.
• Revocation and rotation must reach nodes that may already be offline or compromised.
• Disconnected operation conflicts with strict central authorisation.
• Failure handling must not turn a transient partition into a persistent security downgrade.

Expected outcome

A prototype authenticated communication framework and protocol-security evaluation.

Tags

distributed systemsmutual authenticationauthorisationreplay protectioncredential rotationpartition tolerance

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