Approaching Shannon's One-Time Pad: Metrics, Architectures, and Enabling Technologies

TL;DR

This paper introduces new metrics and architectures aiming to achieve Shannon's one-time pad perfect secrecy in wireless communications, addressing challenges posed by advanced computing technologies like quantum computing.

Contribution

It proposes novel metrics (DoA and DoSA) to quantify security closeness to perfect secrecy and presents two approaches with architectures and technologies for secure transmission.

Findings

Metrics effectively characterize security proximity to perfect secrecy

Two approaches demonstrate feasible architectures and technologies

Preliminary results show promising security enhancements

Abstract

The rapid development of advanced computing technologies such as quantum computing imposes new challenges to current wireless security mechanism which is based on cryptographic approaches. To deal with various attacks and realize long-lasting security, we are in urgent need of disruptive security solutions. In this article, novel security transmission paradigms are proposed to approach Shannon's one-time pad perfect secrecy. First, two metrics, termed as Degree-of-Approaching (DoA) and Degree-of-Synchronous-Approaching (DoSA), are developed to characterize the closeness between the achieved security strength and perfect secrecy. These two metrics also serve as a guideline for secure transmission protocol design. After that, we present two paths towards Shannon's one-time pad, i.e., an explicit-encryption based approach and an implicit-encryption based approach. For both of them, we discuss the architecture design, enabling technologies, as well as preliminary performance evaluation results. The techniques presented in this article provide promising security-enhancing solutions for future wireless networks.