Scalable Multiterminal Key Agreement via Error-Correcting Codes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a scalable multiterminal key agreement protocol leveraging error-correcting codes, specifically Reed-Solomon codes, to enhance security and efficiency in secret sharing and key distribution.

Contribution

It presents a novel connection between secret sharing and key agreement, utilizing Reed-Solomon codes for scalable, secure key establishment with new bounds on secret key capacity.

Findings

Protocol ensures no information leakage to eavesdroppers

Derived bounds for full-rank MDS codes and secret key capacity

Utilized duality with multivariate mutual information

Abstract

We explore connections between secret sharing and secret key agreement, which yield a simple and scalable multiterminal key agreement protocol. In our construction, we use error-correcting codes, specifically Reed-Solomon codes with threshold reconstruction, to ensure no information is leaked to an eavesdropper. We then derive novel bounds for both full-rank maximum distance separable codes and our scheme's secret key capacity, using key capacity's duality with multivariate mutual information.