Improving wireless security through network diversity

Abstract

Data confidentiality over mobile devices can be difficult to secure due to a lack of computing power and weak supporting encryption components. However, modern devices often have multiple wireless interfaces with diverse channel capacities and security capabilities. We show that the availability of diverse, heterogeneous links (physical or logical) between nodes in a network can be used to increase data confidentiality, on top of the availability or strength of underlying encryption techniques. We introduce a new security approach using multiple channels to transmit data securely, based on the idea of deliberate corruption, and information reduction, and analyze its security using the information theoretic concept of secrecy capacity, and the wiretap channel. Our work introduces the idea of channel design with security in mind.