Shannon showed that to achieve perfect secrecy in point-to-point communication, the message rate cannot exceed the shared secret key rate giving rise to the simple one-time pad encryption scheme. In this paper, we extend this work from point-to-point to networks. We consider a connected network with pairwise communication between the nodes. We assume that each node is provided with a certain amount of secret bits before communication commences. An eavesdropper with unlimited computing power has access to all communication and can hack a subset of the nodes not known to the rest of the nodes. We investigate the limits on information-theoretic secure communication for this network. We establish a tradeoff between the secure channel rate (for a node pair) and the secure network rate (sum over all node pair rates) and show that perfect secrecy can be achieved if and only if the sum rate of any subset of unhacked channels does not exceed the shared unhacked-secret-bit rate of these channels. We also propose two practical and efficient schemes that achieve a good balance of network and channel rates with perfect secrecy guarantee. This work has a wide range of potential applications for which perfect secrecy is desired, such as cyber-physical systems, distributed-control systems, and ad-hoc networks.
This paper revisits formalizations of information-theoretic security for symmetric-key encryption and key agreement protocols which are very fundamental primitives in cryptography. In general, we can formalize information-theoretic security in various ways: some of them can be formalized as stand-alone security by extending (or relaxing) Shannon's perfect secrecy or by other ways such as semantic security; some of them can be done based on composable security. Then, a natural question about this is: what is the gap between the formalizations? To answer the question, we investigate relationship…
We combine interactive zero-knowledge protocols and weak physical layer randomness properties to construct a protocol which allows bootstrapping an IT-secure and PF-secure channel from a memorizable shared secret. The protocol also tolerates failures of its components, still preserving most of its security properties, which makes it accessible to regular users.
The information theoretic approach to security entails harnessing the correlated randomness available in nature to establish security. It uses tools from information theory and coding and yields provable security, even against an adversary with unbounded computational power. However, the feasibility of this approach in practice depends on the development of efficiently implementable schemes. In this article, we review a special class of practical schemes for information theoretic security that are based on 2-universal hash families. Specific cases of secret key agreement and wiretap coding are…
Physical layer security has been recently recognized as a promising new design paradigm to provide security in wireless networks. In addition to the existing conventional cryptographic methods, physical layer security exploits the dynamics of fading channels to enhance secured wireless links. In this approach, jamming plays a key role by generating noise signals to confuse the potential eavesdroppers, and significantly improves quality and reliability of secure communications between legitimate terminals. This article presents theoretical limits and practical designs of jamming approaches for …
Repair operations in distributed storage systems potentially expose the data to malicious acts of passive eavesdroppers or active adversaries, which can be detrimental to the security of the system. This paper presents erasure codes and repair algorithms that ensure security of the data in the presence of passive eavesdroppers and active adversaries, while maintaining high availability, reliability and efficiency in the system. Our codes are optimal in that they meet previously proposed lower bounds on the storage, network-bandwidth, and reliability requirements for a wide range of system para…
This paper highlights security issues that can arise when incorrect assumptions are made on the capabilities of an eavesdropper. In particular, we analyze a channel model based on a split Binary Symmetric Channel (BSC). Corresponding security parameters are chosen based on this channel model, and assumptions on the eavesdroppers capabilities. A gradual relaxation of the restrictions on the eavesdropper's capabilities will be made, and the resulting loss of security will be quantified. An alternative will then be presented that is based on stochastic encoding and creating artificially noisy cha…
All-or-nothing transforms (AONT) were proposed by Rivest as a message preprocessing technique for encrypting data to protect against brute-force attacks, and have numerous applications in cryptography and information security. Later the unconditionally secure AONT and their combinatorial characterization were introduced by Stinson. Informally, a combinatorial AONT is an array with the unbiased requirements and its security properties in general depend on the prior probability distribution on the inputs $s$-tuples. Recently, it was shown by Esfahani and Stinson that a combinatorial AONT has per…
We study security functions which can serve to establish semantic security for the two central problems of information-theoretic security: the wiretap channel, and privacy amplification for secret key generation. The security functions are functional forms of mosaics of combinatorial designs, more precisely, of group divisible designs and balanced incomplete block designs. Every member of a mosaic is associated with a unique color, and each color corresponds to a unique message or key value. Every block index of the mosaic corresponds to a public seed shared between the two trusted communicati…
In this two-part paper, we consider the transmission of confidential data over wireless wiretap channels. The first part presents an information-theoretic problem formulation in which two legitimate partners communicate over a quasi-static fading channel and an eavesdropper observes their transmissions through another independent quasi-static fading channel. We define the secrecy capacity in terms of outage probability and provide a complete characterization of the maximum transmission rate at which the eavesdropper is unable to decode any information. In sharp contrast with known results for …
Physical layer security is an emerging technique to improve the wireless communication security, which is widely regarded as a complement to cryptographic technologies. To design physical layer security techniques under practical scenarios, the uncertainty and imperfections in the channel knowledge need to be taken into consideration. This paper provides a survey of recent research and development in physical layer security considering the imperfect channel state information (CSI) at communication nodes. We first present an overview of the main information-theoretic measures of the secrecy per…
In this paper, we study the problem of physical layer security in large-scale multiple input multiple output (LS-MIMO) systems. The large number of antenna elements in LS-MIMO system is exploited to enhance transmission security and improve system performance, especially when the eavesdropper is closer to the information source and has more antennas than the legitimate user. However, in practical systems, the problem becomes challenging because the eavesdropper channel state information (CSI) is usually unavailable without cooperation and the legitimate CSI may be imperfect due to channel esti…
We present information-theoretic definitions and results for analyzing symmetric-key encryption schemes beyond the perfect secrecy regime, i.e. when perfect secrecy is not attained. We adopt two lines of analysis, one based on lossless source coding, and another akin to rate-distortion theory. We start by presenting a new information-theoretic metric for security, called symbol secrecy, and derive associated fundamental bounds. We then introduce list-source codes (LSCs), which are a general framework for mapping a key length (entropy) to a list size that an eavesdropper has to resolve in order…
We study side-channel attacks for the Shannon cipher system. To pose side channel-attacks to the Shannon cipher system, we regard them as a signal estimation via encoded data from two distributed sensors. This can be formulated as the one helper source coding problem posed and investigated by Ahlswede, Körner(1975), and Wyner(1975). We further investigate the posed problem to derive new secrecy bounds. Our results are derived by a coupling of the result Watanabe and Oohama(2012) obtained on bounded storage evasdropper with the exponential strong converse theorem Oohama(2015) established for th…
In this paper, we investigate the impact of side information (SI) on the performance of physical layer security (PLS) under correlated fading channels. By considering non-causally known SI at the transmitter and exploiting the copula technique to describe the fading correlation, we derive closed-from expressions for the average secrecy capacity (ASC) and secrecy outage probability (SOP) under positive/negative dependence conditions. We indicate that considering such knowledge at the transmitter is beneficial for system performance and ensures reliable communication with higher rates, as it imp…
This paper analyzes the information-theoretical security of the Differential Phase Shift (DPS) Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) protocol, using efficient computational information geometric algorithms. The DPS QKD protocol was introduced for practical reasons, since the earlier QKD schemes were too complicated to implement in practice. The DPS QKD protocol can be an integrated part of current network security applications, hence it's practical implementation is much easier with the current optical devices and optical networks. The proposed algorithm could be a very valuable tool to answer the st…
Security aspects of the Index Coding with Side Information (ICSI) problem are investigated. Building on the results of Bar-Yossef et al. (2006), the properties of linear index codes are further explored. The notion of weak security, considered by Bhattad and Narayanan (2005) in the context of network coding, is generalized to block security. It is shown that the linear index code based on a matrix $L$, whose column space code $C(L)$ has length $n$, minimum distance $d$ and dual distance $d^\perp$, is $(d-1-t)$-block secure (and hence also weakly secure) if the adversary knows in advance $t \le…
We consider the secure communication problem for broadcasting of two encrypted sources. The sender wishes to broadcast two secret messages via two common key cryptosystems. We assume that the adversary can use the side-channel, where the side information on common keys can be obtained via the rate constraint noiseless channel. To solve this problem we formulate the post encryption coding system. On the information leakage on two secrete messages to the adversary, we provide an explicit sufficient condition to attain the exponential decay of this quantity for large block lengths of encrypted so…
Information-theoretic security--widely accepted as the strictest notion of security--relies on channel coding techniques that exploit the inherent randomness of propagation channels to strengthen the security of communications systems. Within this paradigm, we explore strategies to improve secure connectivity in a wireless network. We first consider the intrinsically secure communications graph (iS-graph), a convenient representation of the links that can be established with information-theoretic security on a large-scale network. We then propose and characterize two techniques--sectorized tra…
Physical layer security is a promising approach that can benefit traditional encryption methods. The idea of physical layer security is to take advantage of the features of the propagation medium and its impairments to ensure secure communication in the physical layer. This work introduces a comprehensive review of the main information-theoretic metrics used to measure the secrecy performance in physical layer security. Furthermore, a theoretical framework related to the most commonly used physical layer security techniques to improve the secrecy performance is provided. Finally, our work surv…
