The project aims at quantifying a general network's inner potential for supporting various forms of security by achieving secret common randomness between pairs or groups of its nodes. Statistical and computational secrecy measures are being considered against a general passive adversary. Common-randomness-achieving protocols are classified into two groups: culture-building and crowd-shielding. The former achieves common randomness between nodes situated in close proximity of each other, from correlated observations of specific (natural or induced) network phenomena. The latter ties together the security of multiple communication links, to the point where an adversary can no longer isolate and attack a single link without attacking the group as a whole. The broad range of investigated protocols cover multiple topics, from multipath diversity to network tomography, from secure network coding to protocol coding, and from anonymous routing to the spread of epidemics. The protocols harvest network randomness from diverse sources like ciphertext blocks originating at various terminals, contention protocols (delay randomness) or network topology (in highly-dynamic, or ad-hoc networks).
Communication networks are naturally dynamic, inherently redundant, and largely unpredictable. While the former two features have long been recognized as a valuable resource for integrity, efficiency and confidentiality, network unpredictability is often regarded as an incommodity. This project shows how network randomness can be harvested, and, together with diversity, exploited to enhance communication security. In doing so, it develops a more profound understanding about the statistical nature of networks, which can be applied to a broad range of information-assurance objectives. The technical approaches and the general philosophy developed in this project, and disseminated through conferences and seminars, have the potential to inspire an abundance of related research. The project will directly impact dozens of students through Senior Design projects, a research-and-open-project approach to curriculum development, and three new graduate courses containing related topics. The PIs are actively involved in programs aimed at increasing the involvement of women, underrepresented minorities, and persons with disabilities in engineering and computing sciences.
