Enhancing NextG Wireless Security: A Lightweight Secret Sharing Scheme with Robust Integrity Check for Military Communications

Multipath communication is a promising approach to enhance confidentiality and resilience in NextG wireless communications, particularly in critical military applications. By integrating threshold secret sharing with multipath communication, we can further protect against attacks that target a single path. However, most existing schemes rely on computationally demanding polynomial interpolation, which limits their practicality in real-world scenarios. This paper introduces a novel, lightweight XOR-based secret sharing scheme, coupled with an efficient two-dimensional (2D) integrity check mechanism, specifically designed for multipath communication scenarios. The proposed scheme significantly reduces computational overhead, achieving a 13.42x faster encoding time and a 360x faster decoding speed compared to Shamir’s Secret Sharing, using an input size of 8.2 KB. Our method ensures the secure and resilient transmission of data, even in adversarial environments, by effectively detecting and pinpointing tampered shares.