Securing information transmission by redundancy

Abstract

Many approaches have been used or proposed for providing security for information dissemination oyer networks, including encryption, authentication, and digital signatures. These mechanisms do not, however, necessarily help ensure that a message is delivered at all. Attacks that try to destroy or intercept security messages require other mechanisms. Authenticated acknowledgements are sometimes useful for this purpose, but do not scale well. This paper discusses the use of redundancy to combat attempts to prevent information dissemination. Redundancy has been widely used in other areas, such as high availability data storage, file replication, and some fault-tolerant systems. The security problem has different characteristics that require different approaches to redundancy. We present one example of using redundancy to increase assurance of security updates delivery.