Collaborative Research: CIF: Medium: Do You Trust Me? Practical Approaches and Fundamental Limits for Keyless Authentication

过去十年见证了各种各样的新兴通信系统，这些系统几乎彻底改变了社会的各个方面。为了支持这场革命，需要进一步的技术进步来解决日益增长的安全和隐私问题，包括打击敌对实体篡改通信的企图。尽管最近在网络安全方面取得了进展，例如公开密钥加密和各种安全协议，但当前安全解决方案的设计通常基于对手始终存在的假设。在实践中，这种假设可能会浪费资源：即使对手可能在任何时刻出现，但它们在大多数时间都不存在。本项目将身份验证作为一种高效、低复杂性的通信系统安全方法进行探讨。经过身份验证的通信需要将消息从一个位置传输到另一个位置，这样每当接收方接受消息时，它就可以保证消息没有被损坏。这种方法的特点是，它不需要用户之间预先共享任何秘密知识，而且当对手不存在时，它几乎不会产生额外的成本，而当对手存在时，它会立即发出警报信号。这项研究旨在促进工程和数学之间的跨学科合作，并将积极吸引各院校的本科生和研究生。该项目解决了与基本性能限制和最佳身份验证代码设计原则相关的信息和编码理论问题，以及身份验证在计算和机器学习等新兴领域的应用。首先，在研究小组初步工作的基础上，推导出点对点通信系统中认证的新基本限制。这包括对高斯模型和近视信道的研究，在近视信道中，对手看到传输信号的噪声版本，并可能利用这些知识来告知其策略。接下来，该项目将通过考虑部分校正的新目标来研究规范网络，该目标允许接收器解码传输信息的一小部分，即使它必须拒绝其余部分。这些理论发现也将转化为实际的认证编码方案。特别是，新的代码结构正在通过将控制数量的非线性纳入现有的线性编码方案而开发。最后，身份验证在分布式计算和监督学习中的数据集完整性等新兴应用环境中得到解释和应用。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，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。

The last decade has witnessed a wide variety of emerging communication systems that have revolutionized nearly every aspect of society. To support this revolution, further technological advances are required to address ever-growing security and privacy concerns, including combating attempts by adversarial entities at tampering with communications. Despite recent advances in network security, such as public-key cryptography and various security protocols, the current design of security solutions is often governed by the assumption that an adversary is present at all times. In practice, this assumption may waste resources: even though adversaries may appear at any moment, they are not present for a majority of the time. This project explores authentication as an efficient, low-complexity approach to the security of communication systems. Authenticated communication requires transmitting a message from one location to another, so that whenever the receiver accepts a message, it can guarantee the message has not been corrupted. The hallmark of this approach is that it does not require any pre-shared secret knowledge between users, and it incurs little extra cost when an adversary is not present while providing an immediate alarm signal when one is. This research aims to foster interdisciplinary cooperation across engineering and mathematics, and will actively engage both undergraduate and graduate students across institutions.The project addresses information- and coding-theoretic questions related to both fundamental performance limits and principles of optimal authentication code design, along with the application of authentication to emerging areas such as computing and machine learning. First, new fundamental limits for authentication in point-to-point communication systems are being derived, building on the research team’s preliminary work. This includes the study of Gaussian models as well as myopic channels, where the adversary sees a noisy version of the transmitted signal and may use this knowledge to inform its strategy. Next, the project is studying canonical networks by considering a novel objective of partial correction, which allows a receiver to decode a fraction of the transmitted messages, even if it must reject the remainder. These theoretical findings will also be translated into practical coding schemes for authentication. In particular, new code constructions are being developed by incorporating a controlled amount of non-linearity into existing linear coding schemes. Finally, authentication is being interpreted in and applied to the context of emerging applications such as distributed computing and dataset integrity in supervised learning.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.