Optimal secret sharing for secure wireless communications in the era of Internet of Things

Abstract

Secret sharing is crucial to information security in smart city related wireless applications. In this paper, we study how to optimally share secrets between two users using the effect of wireless channel dynamics on the data link layer. Specifically, we formulate an optimization problem whose objective is to minimize the expectation of the probability that an eavesdropper receives all secret sharing packets. Our contributions are: (i) we come up with the secret sharing mechanism that minimizes the aforementioned objective function and (ii) we perform analysis on our approach and derive the worst-case probability of the eavesdropper receiving all secret sharing packets. Our theoretical results are validated via simulations.