A Network Modeling and Analysis Tool for Perfectly Secure Communication

Secure communication is often based on encryption thus hinges on (public-key) infrastructures that handle all the key-management. This inevitably requires human intervention, thus creating a rather vulnerable point in the system. So it appears desirable to automate key-management tasks to the widest possible extent. In this work, we report on a software implementation of secure multipath transmission. Our system takes a network infrastructure model as input and determines the maximal achievable security for a communication between a chosen sender and receiver, while handling all key-management transparently for the user. The security is information-theoretic, and unlike public-key or symmetric cryptography does neither hinge on computational intractability nor empirical evidence. More importantly, security can be measured in quantitative terms, thus making the results useful in enterprise risk management. Our software computes the risk for a given transmission under multipath transmission and generates simple textsc{OmNet++} models to demonstrate the channel construction as practically doable and to measure the additional network overhead. This is for a-priori decision-support and practical guidance for an installation of secure multipath transmission as a high-security transmission service within the enterprise network.