Secrecy Through Synchronization Errors

TL;DR

This paper introduces a secure communication scheme that leverages synchronization errors intentionally created by the transmitter, ensuring information-theoretic security without assumptions on the eavesdropper's channel, and provides theoretical bounds and evaluation methods.

Contribution

It presents a novel transmission scheme using deliberate synchronization errors for security, with a secrecy capacity theorem and practical evaluation techniques.

Findings

Secrecy capacity theorem established

Lower bounds on secrecy capacity derived

Numerical methods for capacity evaluation proposed

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a transmission scheme that achieves information theoretic security, without making assumptions on the eavesdropper's channel. This is achieved by a transmitter that deliberately introduces synchronization errors (insertions and/or deletions) based on a shared source of randomness. The intended receiver, having access to the same shared source of randomness as the transmitter, can resynchronize the received sequence. On the other hand, the eavesdropper's channel remains a synchronization error channel. We prove a secrecy capacity theorem, provide a lower bound on the secrecy capacity, and propose numerical methods to evaluate it.