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

随着无线网络变得无处不在，在相互连接的无线设备和用户之间保持信任和安全地交换机密信息的能力至关重要。秘密共享是一种加密原语，可以帮助实现与应用程序的安全通信，包括访问控制、密钥管理、数字签名等。尽管这个原语被广泛使用，但人们仍然没有完全理解如何在秘密共享方案的设计中最优地考虑诸如噪声、有限带宽和可扩展性等无线通信约束。该项目旨在为直接适应无线通信约束的秘密共享实现提供新的指导方针，以提高用户的安全性，最大限度地降低与实现相关的通信成本，并通过提高可扩展性促进在密集无线网络中的部署。大多数现有的秘密共享方案都依赖于这样一个假设，即交易商可以通过无限带宽的无噪声通道安全地将秘密共享传递给参与者。在这种假设下，在无线网络中实现秘密共享方案需要额外的协议层，这些协议层能够处理经销商和参与者之间不安全、有噪声和带宽有限的通信通道。该项目的目的是了解这种分层方法是否最优，以及同时解决无线通信约束和秘密共享要求的方案是否可以在通信效率和安全保障方面获得收益。该项目调查了两个相互依存的研究任务：(i)了解带宽限制和噪声下无线网络中秘密共享的基本安全限制，以及（ii）使用密码学和编码理论工具设计明确的低复杂性编码方案。该奖项由计算机与信息科学与工程理事会计算与通信基础部和综合活动办公室促进竞争性研究的既定计划共同资助。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。

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.