A Theory for Optimizing Insecure Internetwork Connections

While internetwork connections among private and public networks are inevitable and essential for enhancing the data rate and range of communication among networks, they introduce new vulnerabilities and risks of security breach to the interconnected networks. In this article, a novel information-theoretic model is proposed to analyze the tradeoff between network security and data-rate enhancement considering homogeneous and heterogeneous internetwork connections between two networks. Various patterns of internetwork connections among gateway nodes are studied. The implications of internetwork connections on data manipulation due to security breach by attackers are investigated by modeling the internetwork connections as a noisy communication channel. Specifically, the fundamental limit of the maximum achievable capacity afforded by internetwork connections is characterized, while considering the impact of security vulnerabilities that the internetwork connections introduce. For a nominal data-rate below the fundamental limit, the effect of security breach can be diminished to an arbitrarily low level by channel coding. Notably, any nominal data-rate above the fundamental limit is not achievable; hence, a packet-loss distortion is introduced to keep the data-rate below the fundamental limit. Moreover, the fundamental limit is used to find the optimal number of internetwork connections between two networks under prescribed data-rate and packet-loss distortion constraints.