An Unconditionally Secure Encryption Scheme for IoBT Networks

2025-08-01

AI Summary

To address secure communication in the Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) under an unbounded adversary capable of full eavesdropping—but not tampering—on public channels, this paper proposes a lightweight, information-theoretically secure encryption scheme. The method leverages a globally pre-shared random binary matrix combined with pairwise secret keys, and employs modular addition over a finite group for efficient encryption and decryption. Its key contribution is resilience against key recovery attacks even if the global matrix is compromised, while guaranteeing unconditional semantic security: an adversary observing ciphertexts gains negligible advantage—exponentially small—in distinguishing any two plaintexts. Designed specifically for resource-constrained IoBT devices, the scheme bridges theoretical rigor and practical deployability, introducing a novel key management paradigm that simultaneously achieves provable security and low computational overhead.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Internet of Things, Sensor Networks & Smart Cities
• Machine Learning: Privacy
• Computer Vision: Adversarial Attacks & Robustness

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Applications of cryptography
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• Responsible Web: Measurement, analysis, and circumvention of Web censorship

Abstract

We consider an Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) system consisting of multiple devices that want to securely communicate with each other during a mission in the presence of an adversary with unbounded computational power. The adversary has complete access to listen/read the ciphertext without tampering with the communication line. We provide an unconditionally secure encryption scheme to exchange messages among devices in the system. The main idea behind the scheme is to provide secret keys to exchange messages using a random binary matrix that is securely shared among all the devices, and pair-wise random secret keys established between each pair of devices attempting to communicate before the mission. The scheme is implemented by using finite group modular addition. We show that the scheme is absolutely semantically secure, i.e., the scheme guarantees that an adversary with unbounded computational power cannot get even one bit of information about a message, except for an exponentially small probability in a security parameter. Besides that, we show that even if the random binary matrix is revealed to the adversary, the provided scheme is computationally secure against the key recovery attack.

Problem

• Secure communication in IoBT networks against unbounded adversaries
• Unconditionally secure encryption using shared random binary matrix
• Ensuring semantic security and computational security against key recovery

Innovation

• Uses random binary matrix for secret keys
• Employs finite group modular addition
• Ensures unconditional semantic security