Short Message Multichannel Broadcast Encryption

Abstract

The current use of short messages in wireless networks is highly growing. Messaging applications in mobile terminals with wireless coverage are very common in shopping, educational and transport centers, i.e. in centers of massive influx of people. This requires improving its efficiency, without losing security in such a hostile environment. In this paper, we propose an improvement in the use of the medium through a new multichannel broadcast encryption paradigm. Firstly, we rigorously demonstrate the security of our model that is characterized by two main issues: short messages and maintaining privacy in a shared frame. The improvements are obtained by reducing the transmitted overheads, saving bandwidth and airtime. To implement them, we improve the efficiency of communications, reducing the security headers to a single one, which will be shared by all receivers, while the payload is multiplexed via Chinese Remainder Theorem. In this way we reduce the packet length (less headers) and set the ratio of the encrypted text/plaintext equals to one, if we do not take into account padding and security headers. Although the model can be used by all types of networks, both wired and wireless, the improvement is more noticeable in the latter type. To make it remarkable, we quantify what this gain will consist of.