CIF: Small: Collaborative Research: Secret Key Generation Under Resource Constraints

公共共享密钥可用于加密/解密、身份验证和各种其他安全原语，在确保现代数字系统的安全方面起着重要作用。由于其重要性，在密钥生成/分发方案的设计上进行了大量的工作。尽管做出了这些努力，可伸缩性和可用性等重大挑战仍有待解决。本项目研究了密钥生成的信息理论方法，重点是在更现实的模型下解决基本和具有挑战性的问题。所得到的方案有望更容易地应用于实际无线网络的设计。该项目将利用与行业的合作，并将积极参与不同背景的学生。特别是，该项目将通过公众讨论制定密钥生成框架下的密钥生成方案。这个框架下的标准方案是所谓的“全知”方案。然而，这种方案要求网络中的所有节点都进行传输，假设公共讨论被网络中的所有节点都无声地听到，并且没有考虑实现的复杂性。虽然这些假设使问题易于处理，并有助于获得关键的见解，但为了使这些研究在实践中提供有用和准确的指导，必须考虑到现实的限制，这提出了本项目将探索的三个基本方向。在这个项目中，推力1侧重于具有声音约束的密钥生成，解决以下基本问题：对于一般源网络，是否有可能设计仅涉及一部分节点进行对话但仍能实现密钥容量的方案？推力2侧重于具有物理通道约束的密钥生成。特别是，由于物理通道的约束，本项目将针对每个节点的公开讨论只能被其传输范围内的节点接收，且多个节点同时传输会相互干扰的场景，设计密钥生成方案。推力3侧重于具有复杂性约束的密钥生成，并研究如何最小化密钥生成方案设计的复杂性以及如何减少密钥生成方案所需的计算资源消耗。

Common shared keys, which can be used for encryption/decryption, authentication and various other security primitives, plays a fundamental role in securing modern digital systems. Due to such significant importance, there has been a tremendous amount of work on the design of key generation/distribution schemes. Despite of these efforts, significant challenges, such as scalability and availability, remain to be fully addressed. This project investigates information theoretic approaches for secret key generation with focuses on fundamental and challenging issues under more realistic models. The resulting schemes are anticipated to be more easily applied to the design of practical wireless networks. The project will leverage collaboration with industries and will actively involve students with various backgrounds.In particular, the project will develop key generation schemes under the framework of key generation via public discussion. The standard scheme under this framework is a so-called "omniscience" scheme. However, such a scheme requires all nodes in the network to transmit, assumes the public discussion is heard noiselessly by all nodes in the network, and does not take the implementation complexity into consideration. While these assumptions enable the tractability of the problems and facilitate to obtain crucial insights, in order for such studies to provide useful and accurate guidance in practice, realistic constraints must be taken into consideration, which pose three fundamental directions that this project will explore. In this project, thrust 1 focuses on key generation with vocality constraints that addresses the following fundamental question: for a general source network, is it possible to design schemes that involve only a subset of nodes to talk but still achieve the key capacity? Thrust 2 focuses on key generation with physical channel constraints. In particular, motivated by constraints associated with physical channels, the project will design key generation scheme for scenarios when the public discussion of each node can only be received by nodes in its transmission range and the simultaneous transmission of multiple nodes will interfere with each other. Thrust 3 focuses on key generation with complexity constraints and investigates how to minimize the complexity in the design of key generation schemes and how to reduce computational resource consumption required for key generation schemes.