Perfectly Secure Message Transmission Revisited

TL;DR

This paper investigates the conditions for secure message transmission in networks with mixed one-way and two-way channels, extending previous models to include multicast and neighbor network channels, and addressing active adversaries.

Contribution

It provides necessary and sufficient conditions for secure communication in complex network models with mixed channel types and adversary capabilities.

Findings

Established conditions for secure transmission in mixed channel networks.

Extended security analysis to multicast and neighbor network channels.

Addressed active adversary models in network security.

Abstract

Achieving secure communications in networks has been one of the most important problems in information technology. Dolev, Dwork, Waarts, and Yung have studied secure message transmission in one-way or two-way channels. They only consider the case when all channels are two-way or all channels are one-way. Goldreich, Goldwasser, and Linial, Franklin and Yung, Franklin and Wright, and Wang and Desmedt have studied secure communication and secure computation in multi-recipient (multicast) models. In a ``multicast channel'' (such as Ethernet), one processor can send the same message--simultaneously and privately--to a fixed subset of processors. In this paper, we shall study necessary and sufficient conditions for achieving secure communications against active adversaries in mixed one-way and two-way channels. We also discuss multicast channels and neighbor network channels.