Abstract
DTN environment is characterized by intermittent connectivity, high/variable delay, heterogeneity, high error rate and asymmetric data rate amongst others. These characteristics accounts for the poor behavior of Internet protocols in this environment. To address these problems, DTN was conceived and designed together with specialized protocols to carry out its services. Its emergence called for a new concept in security that was considered at the design stage. The main aim of this paper is to propose a traditional cryptography based authentication scheme that does not depend on network administrator’s availability during post network authentication communication and facilitates bundle processing by the recipient in the absence of connectivity. In this paper, we present and discuss the system model, the proposed credential and the propose authentication scheme. A simulation framework is developed for the implementation of the proposed and referenced schemes. From the simulation results, the proposed scheme was observed to be independent of network administrator’s availability during post network authentication communication and facilitates bundle processing in the absence of connectivity.