A multipath routing approach for secure data delivery

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to enhance data confidentiality when transmitting across insecure networks. The idea is to take advantage of the distributed nature of networks such as Internet or wireless networks and combine the secret sharing scheme and multipath routing. With a (T,N) secret sharing scheme, the secure message is divided into N shares such that from any T or more shares, we can easily recover the message, while from any T-1 or less shares, it is computationally impossible to recover the message. Then using the multipath routing algorithm, the shares are delivered across the network via N different paths, where no T or more paths can share a single node. The destination node reconstructs the original message upon receiving T or more shares. However, any intermediate node does not intercept T shares necessary for the message recovery. In this paper, we present the basic idea, then, we describe a distributed multipath routing algorithm to find the desired N different paths. The algorithm takes path independence, path quantity, as well as path cost into consideration. With comparably low complexity, the algorithm is able to find, between any source-destination pair, sets of node disjoint paths. The algorithm is compared with another disjoint path finding algorithm and the result shows that our algorithm has better performance in terms of number of paths found.