Key agreement in wireless networks with active adversaries

摘要

A network and related methods for transmitting processes in a network secretly and securely is described. The network use keys, through path-key establishment and a key pool bootstrapping, to ensure that packets are transmitted and received properly and secretly in the presence of one or more adversarial nodes.

主权项

1. A network of computers with error correction code configured to transmit keys secretly and securely comprising:
a first computer-based workstation operating as a source node and configured to encode a key into a plurality of distinct encoded source files, encoding being operatively implemented in one of: a) hardware, b) software, and c) a combination of a) and b); a plurality of computer-based workstations operating as a plurality of intermediate nodes and configured to each receive a distinct encoded source file of the plurality of distinct encoded source files and transmit, to a receiver node, the distinct encoded source file when requested by the receiver; and a second computer-based workstation operating as the receiver node and configured to decode the plurality of distinct encoded source files and retrieve the key, decoding being operatively implemented in one of: a) hardware, b) and/or software, and c) a combination of a) and b); wherein the encoding, transmitting and decoding of the key comprise the following steps:
generating the key to be transmitted from the source node to the receiver node,generating one or more random packets independently and uniformly within the source node,generating a distinct encoded file for each intermediate node in the network, the encoded file comprising a linear combination of the key, the one or more random packets that were independently and uniformly generated and corresponding error detection information,forwarding each of the distinct encoded files generated by the source node to each corresponding intermediate node of the plurality of intermediate nodes within the network via a first plurality of intermediate transmission links,forwarding each of the distinct encoded files, upon request by the receiver node, from the corresponding intermediate node via a second plurality of intermediate transmission links, anddecoding the key from the plurality of encoded files, the error detection information used to determine if an error was present in either the intermediate transmission link and/or the intermediate node for a particular encoded file.