Universal Hashing for Information Theoretic Security

TL;DR

This paper reviews practical schemes for information theoretic security using 2-universal hash families, focusing on secret key agreement and wiretap coding, emphasizing modular and implementable solutions.

Contribution

It introduces a modular wiretap coding scheme based on 2-universal hashing, enhancing practical implementation of information theoretic security.

Findings

The wiretap coding scheme is modular and easily implementable.

Hash-based schemes provide provable security against unbounded adversaries.

The approach is applicable to secret key agreement and secure communication.

Abstract

The information theoretic approach to security entails harnessing the correlated randomness available in nature to establish security. It uses tools from information theory and coding and yields provable security, even against an adversary with unbounded computational power. However, the feasibility of this approach in practice depends on the development of efficiently implementable schemes. In this article, we review a special class of practical schemes for information theoretic security that are based on 2-universal hash families. Specific cases of secret key agreement and wiretap coding are considered, and general themes are identified. The scheme presented for wiretap coding is modular and can be implemented easily by including an extra pre-processing layer over the existing transmission codes.