Secrecy in Untrusted Networks

We investigate the protection of migrating agents against the untrusted sites they traverse. The resulting calculus provides a formal framework to reason about protection policies and security protocols over distributed, mobile infrastructures, and aims to stand to ambients as the spi calculus stands to ?. We present a type system that separates trusted and untrusted data and code, while allowing safe interactions with untrusted sites. We prove that the type system enforces a privacy property, and show the expressiveness of the calculus via examples and an encoding of the spi calculus

A Secure Communication Game with a Relay Helping the Eavesdropper

In this work a four terminal complex Gaussian network composed of a source, a destination, an eavesdropper and a jammer relay is studied under two different set of assumptions: (i) The jammer relay does not hear the source transmission, and (ii) The jammer relay is causally given the source message. In both cases the jammer relay assists the eavesdropper and aims to decrease the achievable secrecy rates. The source, on the other hand, aims to increase it. To help the eavesdropper, the jammer relay can use pure relaying and/or send interference. Each of the problems is formulated as a two-player, non-cooperative, zero-sum continuous game. Assuming Gaussian strategies at the source and the jammer relay in the first problem, the Nash equilibrium is found and shown to be achieved with mixed strategies in general. The optimal cumulative distribution functions (cdf) for the source and the jammer relay that achieve the value of the game, which is the Nash equilibrium secrecy rate, are found. For the second problem, the Nash equilibrium solution is found and the results are compared to the case when the jammer relay is not informed about the source message.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures, to appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, Special Issue on Using the Physical Layer for Securing the Next Generation of Communication Systems. This is the journal version of cs.IT:0911.008

Jamming Games in the MIMO Wiretap Channel With an Active Eavesdropper

This paper investigates reliable and covert transmission strategies in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wiretap channel with a transmitter, receiver and an adversarial wiretapper, each equipped with multiple antennas. In a departure from existing work, the wiretapper possesses a novel capability to act either as a passive eavesdropper or as an active jammer, under a half-duplex constraint. The transmitter therefore faces a choice between allocating all of its power for data, or broadcasting artificial interference along with the information signal in an attempt to jam the eavesdropper (assuming its instantaneous channel state is unknown). To examine the resulting trade-offs for the legitimate transmitter and the adversary, we model their interactions as a two-person zero-sum game with the ergodic MIMO secrecy rate as the payoff function. We first examine conditions for the existence of pure-strategy Nash equilibria (NE) and the structure of mixed-strategy NE for the strategic form of the game.We then derive equilibrium strategies for the extensive form of the game where players move sequentially under scenarios of perfect and imperfect information. Finally, numerical simulations are presented to examine the equilibrium outcomes of the various scenarios considered.Comment: 27 pages, 8 figures. To appear, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin

Mechanism Design and Communication Networks

This paper characterizes the class of communication networks for which, in any environment (utilities and beliefs), every incentive-compatible social choice function is (partially) implementable. Among others, in environments with either common and independent beliefs and private values or a bad outcome, we show that if the communication network is 2-connected, then any incentive-compatible social choice function is implementable. A network is 2-connected if each player is either directly connected to the designer or indirectly connected to the designer through at least two disjoint paths. We couple encryption techniques together with appropriate incentives to secure the transmission of each player’s private information to the designer.Mechanism design; incentives; Bayesian equilibrium; communication networks; encryption; secure transmission; coding