Threshold-Secure Coding with Shared Key
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Cryptographic protocols are often implemented at upper layers of communication networks, while error-correcting codes are employed at the physical layer. In this paper, we consider utilizing readily-available physical layer functions, such as encoders and decoders, together with shared keys to provide a threshold-type security scheme. To this end, the effect of physical layer communication is abstracted out and the channels between the legitimate parties, Alice and Bob, and the eavesdropper Eve are assumed to be noiseless. We introduce a model for threshold-secure coding, where Alice and Bob communicate using a shared key in such a way that Eve does not get any information, in an information-theoretic sense, about the key as well as about any subset of the input symbols of size up to a certain threshold. Then, a framework is provided for constructing threshold-secure codes form linear block codes while characterizing the requirements to satisfy the reliability and security conditions. Moreover, we propose a threshold-secure coding scheme, based on Reed-Muller (RM) codes, that meets security and reliability conditions. Furthermore, it is shown that the encoder and the decoder of the scheme can be implemented efficiently with quasi-linear time complexity. In particular, a low-complexity successive cancellation decoder is shown for the RM-based scheme. Also, the scheme is flexible and can be adapted given any key length.
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