Abstract
Mass surveillance attracts much of attentions nowadays. Evidences showed that some intelligence agencies try to monitor public’s communication by unconventional methods, for example, providing users subverted cryptographic algorithms and compelling them to use. To address this new situation, researchers proposed a series of formal analyses and security definitions. However, current researches are restrictive as they only considered a single surveillant setting. In reality, there may exist multiple surveillants for different governments or manufacturers. This paper initializes the analysis of security against subversion in a multi-surveillant setting. We consider the case where users could only use subverted algorithms from different sources to achieve a subliminal communication. We introduce a new security notion that the transmission of a real message is “undetectable”, which means all surveillants either think the users execute the subverted algorithms honestly to transmit an innocuous message, or consider users are using non-subverted algorithms. We present a concrete design and prove that it satisfies our security definition.
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Notes
- 1.
In our model we expect the users to transmit \(\mathsf {msg}\) under any cover message. \(\mathcal {M}\) is independent of all users and surveillants, and generates messages with no extra requirement except looking innocent.
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Acknowledgment
The work is supported partly by Beijing Natural Science Foundation (4182033) and National Cryptography Development Fund (MMJJ20180215). We sincerely thank anonymous reviewers for valuable comments, especially about the definition of cover message.
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Li, G., Liu, J., Zhang, Z. (2019). Security Against Subversion in a Multi-surveillant Setting. In: Jang-Jaccard, J., Guo, F. (eds) Information Security and Privacy. ACISP 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11547. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21548-4_23
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