Unconditionally private and reliable communication in an untrusted network
Yvo Desmedt · 2005
Most successful attacks that occur today against computer networks are targeted against the computers connected to the network, but not against the routers. At the BlackHat 2005 conference it was shown that potential attacks against routers are far from hypothetical. Current TCP/IP protocols (even including IPSEC) do not have the resilience to deal with routers taken over by the adversary. We survey the research done in the area of how to communicate reliably and/or privately. In the presence of different types of adversary, for example a malicious (Byzantine) one. Evidently, if the adversary can control all nodes (routers) in the network, no solution exists. The nodes that can be attacked by the adversary can be described using a threshold, or by what is called an adversary structure. The type of networks studied are point-to-point or broadcast/multicast