A unified model for unconditionally secure key distribution

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Cimato, Stelvio^a | Cresti, Antonella^b | D'Arco, Paolo^c

Affiliations: [a] Dipartimento di Tecnologie dell'Informazione Università di Milano, 26013 Crema, Italy. E-mail: cimato@dti.unimi.it | [b] Dipartimento di Scienze dell'Informazione Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, 00198 Roma, Italy. E-mail: cresti@dsi.uniroma1.it | [c] Dipartimento di Informatica ed Applicazioni Università di Salerno, 84081 Baronissi (SA), Italy. E-mail: paodar@dia.unisa.it

Abstract: A key distribution scheme is a method by means of which a trusted party distributes pieces of information among a set of users in such a way that each group of them can compute a common key for secure communication. In this paper we present a model for unconditionally secure key distribution schemes, i.e., schemes whose security is independent of the power of the adversary. We prove lower bounds on the amount of information the trusted party has to generate and each user has to keep secret in such schemes, and we show that some previous unconditionally secure models for key distribution fall in our model. As a consequence, the lower bounds given in the literature for these models can be seen as corollaries of our results. Hence, the main contribution of the paper consists in pointing out a sort of common structure underlying some apparently different key distribution techniques.

Keywords: Key distribution, information theory, broadcast encryption

DOI: 10.3233/JCS-2006-14102

Journal: Journal of Computer Security, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 45-64, 2006