Enhancement of Secrecy of Block Ciphered Systems by Deliberate Noise
This work addresses security enhancement for communication systems using block ciphers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing wiretap channel and secrecy encoding concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of enhancing end-to-end security in block ciphered systems by injecting deliberate noise into ciphertexts to create a degraded wiretap channel, enabling additional secure information delivery through Wyner-type secrecy encoding, with numerical results showing a sufficiently large secrecy rate can be achieved.
This paper considers the problem of end-end security enhancement by resorting to deliberate noise injected in ciphertexts. The main goal is to generate a degraded wiretap channel in application layer over which Wyner-type secrecy encoding is invoked to deliver additional secure information. More specifically, we study secrecy enhancement of DES block cipher working in cipher feedback model (CFB) when adjustable and intentional noise is introduced into encrypted data in application layer. A verification strategy in exhaustive search step of linear attack is designed to allow Eve to mount a successful attack in the noisy environment. Thus, a controllable wiretap channel is created over multiple frames by taking advantage of errors in Eve's cryptanalysis, whose secrecy capacity is found for the case of known channel states at receivers. As a result, additional secure information can be delivered by performing Wyner type secrecy encoding over super-frames ahead of encryption, namely, our proposed secrecy encoding-then-encryption scheme. These secrecy bits could be taken as symmetric keys for upcoming frames. Numerical results indicate that a sufficiently large secrecy rate can be achieved by selective noise addition.