An Unconditionally Secure Encryption Scheme for IoBT Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces an unconditionally secure encryption scheme for IoBT networks that guarantees message confidentiality against adversaries with unlimited computational power, using shared secret keys and finite group operations.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel unconditionally secure encryption scheme for IoBT, utilizing shared secret keys and finite group modular addition, ensuring security even if the key matrix is compromised.

Findings

Scheme is absolutely semantically secure against unbounded adversaries.

Security holds even if the random binary matrix is revealed to the adversary.

Provides computational security against key recovery attacks.

Abstract

We consider an Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) system consisting of multiple devices that want to securely communicate with each other during a mission in the presence of an adversary with unbounded computational power. The adversary has complete access to listen/read the ciphertext without tampering with the communication line. We provide an unconditionally secure encryption scheme to exchange messages among devices in the system. The main idea behind the scheme is to provide secret keys to exchange messages using a random binary matrix that is securely shared among all the devices, and pair-wise random secret keys established between each pair of devices attempting to communicate before the mission. The scheme is implemented by using finite group modular addition. We show that the scheme is absolutely semantically secure, i.e., the scheme guarantees that an adversary with unbounded computational power cannot get even one bit of information about a message, except for an exponentially small probability in a security parameter. Besides that, we show that even if the random binary matrix is revealed to the adversary, the provided scheme is computationally secure against the key recovery attack.