CRII: CIF: Secret Sharing Under Communication Constraints in Wireless Networks

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As wireless networks become ubiquitous, the ability to maintain trust and securely exchange confidential information among interconnected wireless devices and users is crucial. Secret sharing is a cryptographic primitive that can help to achieve secure communication with applications that include access control, key management, digital signatures, and others. Although this primitive is widely used, it is still not fully understood how wireless communication constraints such as noise, limited bandwidth, and scalability can be optimally accounted for in the design of secret sharing schemes. This project aims for new guidelines for the implementation of secret sharing directly adapted to wireless communication constraints, to improve security for users, minimize the communication cost associated with the implementation, and facilitate deployment in dense wireless networks through improved scalability.Most existing secret sharing schemes hinge on the assumption that the dealer can securely communicate the shares of the secret to the participants over noiseless channels with unlimited bandwidth. Under such an assumption, the implementation of secret sharing schemes in wireless networks requires additional layers of protocols able to deal with unsecured, noisy, and bandwidth limited communication channels between the dealer and the participants. The objective of this project is to understand whether such a layered approach is optimal and whether a scheme that simultaneously addresses the constraints of wireless communication and the requirements of secret sharing could provide gains in terms of communication efficiency and security guarantees. The project investigates two interdependent research tasks: (i) understanding the fundamental security limits for secret sharing in wireless networks under bandwidth constraints and noise, and (ii) the design of explicit low-complexity coding schemes using tools from cryptography and coding theory.This award is jointly funded by the Division of Computing and Communication Foundations in the Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research in the Office of Integrative Activities.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.