Evolutionary Design of Message Efficient Secrecy Amplification Protocols

Secrecy amplification protocols are mechanisms that can significantly improve security of partially compromised wireless sensor networks (e.g., turning a half-compromised network into the 95% secure one). The main disadvantage of existing protocols is a high communication overhead increasing exponentially with network density. We devise a novel family of these protocols exhibiting only a linear increase of the communication overhead. The protocols are automatically generated by linear genetic programming (LGP) connected to a network simulator. After a deep analysis of various characteristics of this new family of protocols, with a special focus on the tuning of LGP parameters, new and better group-oriented protocols are discovered by LGP. A multi-criteria optimization is then utilized to further reduce the communication overhead down to 1/2 of the original amount while maintaining the original fraction of secure links.