SaTC: CORE: Small: Collaborative: Covert/Secret and Efficient Message Transfer in (Mobile) Multi-Agent Environments

该项目通过利用新兴物联网（IoT）环境中智能日常设备带来的资源来探索秘密和高效（最好是隐蔽）的通信。可靠性、效率和保密性是通信网络中的基本要求。在对抗性环境中，隐藏通信甚至是发生的通信通常是至关重要的，并自动实现隐私和匿名等日益重要的社会目标。 当今网络的这些不可或缺的特征通常是通过分配网络资源的增长部分来获得的，这些网络资源本来可以用于通信。在过去的十年里，出现了各种各样的新型网络系统。例如，未来的5G系统应该比当前的4G网络承载更多的设备。 这个项目不是简单地研究如何用有限的通信资源（能量、频谱）容纳更多的通信对象，并询问现有的网络能为它们做些什么，而是研究这些新的通信对象能为网络做些什么。通过关注物联网场景，其中机会主义和增量增加资源可以带来巨大收益，该项目将开发理论基础和易于采用的实用算法，从而在有限的能源和频谱资源下大幅提高隐蔽性，安全性和可靠性。 该研究计划分为两个中心推力：第一个推力研究了移动的节点之间的一种新型隐蔽，安全和高效的通信方案，其主要特点是任何数据传输都只在短距离内进行，从而减少了对抗行为以及能量和带宽要求。第二个推力建立在第一个推力的基础上，并为窃听者发现消息正在交换和/或拥有一些帮助物联网设备的情况设计安全编码方案。我们的目标不是研究现有编码方案在这种具有挑战性的环境中的性能，而是寻找和研究为这些重要的基于物联网的通信场景量身定制的新编码策略。该项目将提供以前没有的技术解决方案。（主要是高级系统）机会联网的研究，例如1）在不同的网络几何结构中和在各种移动模式下利用偷听机会，2）在移动的环境中经由数据存储和检索建立隐蔽通信，3）使用增量冗余（其可以在现有IoT网络场景中以很小的成本引入）用于对抗和非对抗传输环境中的通信，该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project explores secret and efficient (preferably covert) communications by harnessing the resources brought in by smart everyday devices in emerging Internet of Things (IoT) environments. Reliability, efficiency, and secrecy are essential requirements in communication networks. Hiding that communication is even taking place is often crucial in adversarial environments and automatically achieves the increasingly important societal goals of privacy and anonymity. These indispensable features of today's networks are commonly obtained by allocating a growing fraction of network resources which could otherwise be used for communications. The last decade has seen a wide variety of novel networked systems. For example, future 5G systems are supposed to host hundred times more devices than current 4G networks. Rather than simply looking into how to accommodate more communicating objects with limited communication resources (energy, spectrum) and ask what the existing networks can do for them, this project investigates what these new communicating objects can do for the network. By focusing on IoT scenarios in which opportunistic and incremental addition of resources can result in large gains, this project will develop both theoretical foundations and easily adoptable practical algorithms that lead to substantial increases in covertness, security, and reliability under limited energy and spectrum resources. The research plan is organized in two central thrusts: The first thrust investigates a novel covert, secure and efficient communication scheme between mobile nodes, which has the main feature that any data transfer is only performed over short distances, thus reducing exposure to adversarial actions as well as energy and bandwidth requirements. The second thrust builds on the first one and devises secure coding schemes for the case where an eavesdropper discovers that messages are being exchanged and/or gets in possession of some helping IoT devices. Rather than studying the performance of existing coding schemes in this challenging environment, the goal is to find and study new coding strategies that are tailored to these important IoT-based communication scenarios. This project will offer technical solutions which are not present in previous (predominantly high level systems) studies of opportunistic networking, such as 1) exploiting overhearing opportunities in diverse network geometries and under various mobility patterns, 2) establishing covert communication via data storage and retrieval in mobile environments, 3) using incremental redundancy (which can be introduced at little cost in existing IoT network scenarios) for communications in adversarial and non-adversarial transmission environments, and 4) designing low-complexity coding schemes to exploit this redundancy.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.