Wireless Network Security: Building on Erasures

One of the most widely-known techniques for securing a message from eavesdropping, is the famous one-time pad. Although the one-time pad offers unconditional security, it has limited applicability today, because it requires that to communicate, two parties already share a key that is not known by the eavesdropper and has size equal to the message. In this review paper we present a line of work that explores how we can efficiently share keys securely from an eavesdropper, and thus communicate using a one-time pad like approach. The basic idea is to exploit new opportunities that wireless networks offer, such as the fact that we have multiple paths, the fact that we have packet losses, and the availability of ACK/NACK feedback.