Secure Groupcast with Shared Keys
This work addresses secure communication in groupcast settings with shared keys, providing theoretical bounds for specific combinatorial key arrangements, but it is incremental as it builds on existing secure broadcast models.
The paper tackles the problem of securely broadcasting a common message to a subset of receivers using shared combinatorial keys, characterizing the maximum message rate for specific scenarios like unicast to one receiver with eavesdroppers and groupcast to two out of four receivers, and also determining the minimum broadcast bandwidth for some cases.
We consider a transmitter and $K$ receivers, each of which shares a key variable with the transmitter. Through a noiseless broadcast channel, the transmitter wishes to send a common message $W$ securely to $N$ out of the $K$ receivers while the remaining $K-N$ receivers learn no information about $W$. We are interested in the maximum message rate, i.e., the maximum number of bits of $W$ that can be securely groupcast to the legitimate receivers per key block and the minimum broadcast bandwidth, i.e., the minimum number of bits of the broadcast information required to securely groupcast the message bits. We focus on the setting of combinatorial keys, where every subset of the $K$ receivers share an independent key of arbitrary size. Under this combinatorial key setting, the maximum message rate is characterized for the following scenarios - 1) $N=1$ or $N=K-1$, i.e., secure unicast to 1 receiver with $K-1$ eavesdroppers or secure groupcast to $K-1$ receivers with $1$ eavesdropper, 2) $N=2, K=4$, i.e., secure groupcast to $2$ out of 4 receivers, and 3) the symmetric setting where the key size for any subset of the same cardinality is equal for any $N,K$. Further, for the latter two cases, the minimum broadcast bandwidth for the maximum message rate is characterized.