MICSS: A Realistic Multichannel Secrecy Protocol

Flaws in cryptosystem implementations, such as the Heartbleed bug, render common confidentiality mechanisms ineffective. Defending in depth when this happens would require a different means of providing confidentiality, which could then be layered with existing cryptosystems. This paper presents MICSS, a network protocol which uses multichannel secret sharing rather than encryption to protect data confidentiality. The MICSS protocol ensures perfect secrecy against an (n-1)-channel attacker and operates at line speed in a three-channel throughput benchmark. MICSS provides a practical means of securing network communications, and it layers seamlessly with cryptosystems to mitigate the effects of implementation flaws.