Unconditionally Reliable and Secure Message Transmission in Undirected Synchronous Networks: Possibility, Feasibility and Optimality.
Arpita Patra, Ashish Choudhury, Chandrasekharan Pandu Rangan, Kannan Srinathan
Abstract
We study the interplay of network connectivity and the issues related to the possibility, feasibility and optimality for unconditionally reliable message transmission (URMT) and unconditionally secure message transmission (USMT) in an undirected synchronous network, under the influence of an adaptive mixed adversary A (tb,to,tf,tp), who has unbounded computing power and can corrupt up to tb, to, tf and tp nodes in the network in Byzantine, omission, fail-stop and passive fashion respectively. In URMT problem, a sender S and a receiver R are part of a distributed network, where S and R are connected by intermediate nodes, of which at most tb, to, tf and tp nodes can be under the control of A (tb,to,tf,tp). S wants to send a message m which is a sequence of ℓ (ℓ ≥ 1) field elements from a finite field F to R. The challenge is to design a protocol, such that after interacting in phases1 as per the protocol, R should be able to obtain m with probability at least 1 − δ, where 0 < δ < 1 2, irrespective of any adversarial strategy of A (tb,to,tf,tp). The USMT problem has an additional requirement that A (tb,to,tf,tp) should not know anything about m in information theoretic sense. In this paper, we answer the following in context of URMT and USMT: (a) Possibility: when