A coding-theoretic approach for efficient message verification over insecure channels

We address the problem of allowing authorized users, who have yet to establish a secret key, to securely and efficiently exchange key establishment messages over an insecure channel in the presence of jamming and message insertion attacks. This problem was first introduced by Strasser, Pöpper, Čapkun, and Čagalj in their recent work, leaving joint consideration of security and efficiency as an open problem. In this paper, we present three approaches based on coding theory which reduce the overall time required to verify the packets and reconstruct the original message in the presence of jamming and malicious insertion. We first present the Hashcluster scheme which reduces the total overhead included in the short packets. We next present the Merkleleaf scheme which uses erasure coding to reduce the average number of packet receptions required to reconstruct the message. We then present the Witnesscode scheme which uses one-way accumulators to individually verify packets and reduce redundancy. We demonstrate through analysis and simulation that our candidate protocols can significantly decrease the amount of time required for key establishment in comparison to existing approaches without degrading the guaranteed level of security.