Network Security for Client-Server Architecture Using Wiretap Codes

We propose a method that provides information-theoretic security for client-server communications. By introducing an appropriate encoding scheme, we show how a client-server architecture under active attacks can be modeled as a binary-erasure wiretap channel. The secrecy capacity of the equivalent wiretap channel is then used as a metric to optimize the architecture and limit the impact of the attacks. Upper and lower bounds of the optimal secrecy capacity are derived and analyzed. While still mostly of theoretical interest, our analysis sheds some light on the practical design of resistant and secure client-server architectures.