Coding against a limited-view adversary: The effect of causality and feedback

We consider the problem of communication over a multi-path network in the presence of a causal adversary. The limited-view causal adversary is able to, based on the current and past observations, eavesdrop on a subset of links and also jam on a potentially overlapping subset of links. The goal is to ensure that the communication takes place reliably and secretly. We study two adversarial models - additive and overwrite jamming. For both adversarial models, we consider communication models both without and with passive feedback from decoder to encoder, i.e., the encoder sees everything that the decoder sees. The problem assumes transmissions are in the large alphabet regime. For both types of jamming models, we find the capacity under three scenarios - reliability without feedback, reliability and secrecy without feedback, and reliability with feedback. We observe that in comparison to the non-causal setting the capacity with a causal adversary is strictly increased for a wide variety of parameter settings, and present our intuition through several examples.

[1]  Alan R. Simon,et al.  Network security , 1994 .

[2]  F. Moore,et al.  Polynomial Codes Over Certain Finite Fields , 2017 .

[3]  Prakash Narayan,et al.  Reliable Communication Under Channel Uncertainty , 1998, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory.

[4]  K. Srinathan,et al.  Unconditionally reliable and secure message transmission in undirected synchronous networks: possibility, feasibility and optimality , 2010, Int. J. Appl. Cryptogr..

[5]  Oliver Kosut,et al.  On generalized active attacks by causal adversaries in networks , 2014, 2014 IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW 2014).

[6]  Michael Langberg,et al.  Codes Against Online Adversaries: Large Alphabets , 2013, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

[7]  Moti Yung,et al.  Perfectly secure message transmission , 1993, JACM.

[8]  Sidharth Jaggi,et al.  Design and analysis of network codes , 2005 .

[9]  D. Blackwell,et al.  The Capacities of Certain Channel Classes Under Random Coding , 1960 .

[10]  Richard C. Singleton,et al.  Maximum distance q -nary codes , 1964, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory.

[11]  Lawrence H. Ozarow,et al.  Wire-tap channel II , 1984, AT&T Bell Lab. Tech. J..

[12]  Tracey Ho,et al.  Correction of adversarial errors in networks , 2005, Proceedings. International Symposium on Information Theory, 2005. ISIT 2005..

[13]  Michael Langberg,et al.  Adversarial models and resilient schemes for network coding , 2008, 2008 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory.

[14]  Michael Langberg,et al.  Network Codes Resilient to Jamming and Eavesdropping , 2010, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

[15]  Mayank Bakshi,et al.  Talking reliably, secretly, and efficiently: A “complete” characterization , 2015, 2015 IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW).

[16]  Reihaneh Safavi-Naini,et al.  An efficient code for Adversarial Wiretap channel , 2014, 2014 IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW 2014).

[17]  Robert R. Moeller,et al.  Network Security , 1993, Inf. Secur. J. A Glob. Perspect..