Information-Theoretically Secret Reed-Muller Identification with Affine Designs

Abstract:
We consider the problem of information-theoretic secrecy in identification schemes rather than transmission schemes. In identification, large identities are encoded into small challenges sent with the sole goal of allowing at the receiver reliable verification of whether the challenge could have been generated by a (possibly different) identity of his choice. One of the reasons to consider identification is that it trades decoding for an exponentially larger rate, however this may come with such encoding complexity and latency that it can render this advantage unusable. Identification still bears one unique advantage over transmission in that practical implementation of informationtheoretic secrecy becomes possible, even considering that the information-theoretic secrecy definition needed in identification is that of semantic secrecy. Here, we implement a family of encryption schemes, recently shown to achieve semantic-secrecy capacity, and apply it to a recently-studied family of identification codes, confirming that, indeed, adding secrecy to identification comes at essentially no cost. While this is still within the one-way communication scenario, it is a necessary step into implementing semantic secrecy with two-way communication, where the information-theoretic assumptions are more realistic.