On the Practical Feasibility of Secure Multipath Communication

Abstract

Secure multipath transmission (MPT) uses network path redundancy to achieve privacy in the absence of public-key encryption or any shared secrets for symmetric encryption. Since this form of secret communication works without secret keys, the risk of human failure in key management naturally vanishes, leaving security to rest only on the network management. Consequently, MPT allows for secure communication even under hacker attacks, on condition that at least some parts of the network remain intact (unconquered) at all times. This feature is, however, bought at the price of high network connectivity (densely meshed structures) that is hardly found in real life networks. Based on a game-theoretic treatment of multipath transmission, we present theoretical results for judging the networks suitability for secure communication. In particular, as MPT uses non-intersecting and reliable paths, we present algorithms to compute these in a way that is especially suited for subsequent secure and reliable communication. Our treatment will use MPT as a motivating and illustrating example, however, the results obtained are not limited to any particular application of multipath transmission or security.