Corelab Seminar
2012-2013
Dimitris Sakavalas (NTUA)
Secure Broadcast in Generic and Wireless Networks
Abstract.
Communication networks consist of numerous interacting entities. These entities often wish to
collaborate in order to achieve a certain task even if some of them are malicious/corrupted.
Such considerations put forth the need for secure distributed computing. It is widely accepted
that an integral part of a secure distributed system is a mechanism for reaching ``agreement''
between all non-corrupted parts of a system.
One of the major variations of the agreement problem is the "Secure Broadcast" problem,
where we assume the existence of a designated participant on whose input value every
non-corrupted participant should agree.
The problem has been extensively studied in the
standard model where the communication network is assumed to be complete. In the case
of incomplete communication networks, research has introduced new parameters for
optimization, relative to the network's topology. Moreover topologically restricted corruption models
have been considered, and related problems remain open so far. Finally secure Broadcast in
wireless networks is considered in this thesis. The structure of wireless networks allows the
corrupted entities to cause interference to other receivers, which brings up new challenges
regarding their manipulation. On the other hand, participants are committed
to perform local broadcasts, which greatly facilitates achieving agreement.