A Model for Adversarial Wiretap Channel

Abstract

In wiretap model of secure communication the goal is to provide (asymptotic) perfect secrecy and reliable communication over a noisy channel that is eavesdropped by an adversary with unlimited computational power. This goal is achieved by taking advantage of the channel noise and without requiring a shared key. The model has attracted attention in recent years because it captures eavesdropping attack in wireless communication. The wiretap adversary is a passive eavesdropping adversary at the physical layer of communication. In this paper we propose a model for adversarial wiretap (AWTP) channel that models active adversaries at this layer. We consider a $(ρ_r, ρ_w)$ wiretap adversary who can see a fraction $ρ_r$, and modify a fraction $ρ_w$, of the sent codeword. The code components that are read and/or modified can be chosen adaptively, and the subsets of read and modified components in general, can be different. AWTP codes provide secrecy and reliability for communication over these channels. We give security and reliability definitions and measures for these codes, and define secrecy capacity of an AWTP channel that represents the secrecy potential of the channel. The paper has two main contributions. First, we prove a tight upper bound on the rate of AWTP codes with perfect secrecy for $(ρ_r, ρ_w)$-AWTP channels, and use the bound to derive the secrecy capacity of the channel. We prove a similar bound for $ε$-secure codes also, but in this case the bound is not tight. Second, we give an explicit construction for a capacity achieving AWTP code family, and prove its security and efficiency properties. We show that AWTP model is a natural generalization of Wyner's wiretap models and somewhat surprisingly, also provides a direct generalization for a seemingly unrelated cryptographic primitive, Secure Message Transmission (SMT).