We formulate and study a cryptographic problem relevant to wireless: a sender, Alice, wants to transmit private messages to two receivers, Bob and Calvin, using unreliable wireless broadcast transmissions and short public feedback from Bob and Calvin. We ask, at what rates can we broadcast the private messages if we also provide (information-theoretic) unconditional security guarantees that Bob and Calvin do not learn each-other's message? We characterize the largest transmission rates to the two receivers, for any protocol that provides unconditional security guarantees. We design a protocol that operates at any rate-pair within the above region, uses very simple interactions and operations, and is robust to misbehaving users.
We formulate and study a cryptographic problem relevant to wireless: a sender, Alice, wants to transmit private messages to two receivers, Bob and Calvin, using unreliable wireless broadcast transmissions and short public feedback from Bob and Calvin. We ask, at what rates can we broadcast the private messages if we also provide (information-theoretic) unconditional security guarantees that Bob and Calvin do not learn each-other's message? We characterize the largest transmission rates to the two receivers, for any protocol that provides unconditional security guarantees. We design a protocol that operates at any rate-pair within the above region, uses very simple interactions and operations, and is robust to misbehaving users.
We consider a 1-to-K communication scenario, where a source transmits private messages to K receivers through a broadcast erasure channel, and the receivers feedback strictly, causally, and publicly their channel states after each transmission. We explore the achievable rate region when we require that the message to each receiver remains secret-in the information theoretical sense-from all the other receivers. We characterize the capacity of secure communication in all the cases where the capacity of the 1-to-K communication scenario without the requirement of security is known. As a special case, we characterize the secret-message capacity of a single receiver point-to-point erasure channel with public state-feedback in the presence of a passive eavesdropper. We find that in all the cases where we have an exact characterization, we can achieve the capacity using linear complexity two-phase schemes: in the first phase, we create appropriate secret keys, and in the second phase, we use them to encrypt each message. We find that the amount of key we need is smaller than the size of the message, and equal to the amount of encrypted message the potential eavesdroppers jointly collect. Moreover, we prove that a dishonest receiver that provides deceptive feedback cannot diminish the rate experienced by the honest receivers. We also develop a converse proof which reflects the two-phase structure of our achievability scheme. As a side result, our technique leads to a new outer bound proof for the nonsecure communication problem.
We consider a 1-to-K communication scenario, where a source transmits private messages to K receivers through a broadcast erasure channel, and the receivers feed back strictly causally and publicly their channel states after each transmission. We explore the achievable rate region when we require that the message to each receiver remains secret - in the information theoretical sense - from all the other receivers. We characterize the capacity of secure communication in all the cases where the capacity of the 1-to-K communication scenario without the requirement of security is known. As a special case, we characterize the secret-message capacity of a single receiver point-to-point erasure channel with public state-feedback in the presence of a passive eavesdropper. We find that in all cases where we have an exact characterization, we can achieve the capacity by using linear complexity two-phase schemes: in the first phase we create appropriate secret keys, and in the second phase we use them to encrypt each message. We find that the amount of key we need is smaller than the size of the message, and equal to the amount of encrypted message the potential eavesdroppers jointly collect. Moreover, we prove that a dishonest receiver that provides deceptive feedback cannot diminish the rate experienced by the honest receivers. We also develop a converse proof which reflects the two-phase structure of our achievability scheme. As a side result, our technique leads to a new outer bound proof for the non-secure communication problem.
This paper investigates the secure data transmission in the broadcast channel with noiseless feedback by using the information-theoretic method. We consider transmitting a private message and a common message to two receivers, of which the common message is to be decoded by both receivers while the private message is only for the intended receiver. The channel to the intended receiver is assumed to be independent of that to the other receiver. Feedback from the output of the intended receiver is used as a shared secret key to enhance the secrecy in the transmission. The capacity-equivocation region and the secrecy capacity of this new model are obtained. We find the secrecy capacity is enhanced by using feedback, even in the case that the other receiver is in a better position than the intended receiver. In addition, our results generalize the secrecy capacity of the degraded wiretap channel with secure feedback, and the capacity region of the degraded broadcast channel.
This paper studies the problem of secure communication over the broadcast channel with receiver-side information under the lens of individual secrecy constraints, that is, the transmitter wants to send two independent messages to two receivers, which have, respectively, the desired message of the other receiver as side information, while keeping the eavesdropper ignorant of each message (i.e., the information leakage rate from each message to the eavesdropper is made vanishing). Building upon one-time pad, secrecy coding, and broadcasting schemes, achievable rate regions are investigated, and the capacity region for special cases of either a weak or strong eavesdropper (compared to both legitimate receivers) is characterized. Interestingly, the capacity region for the former corresponds to a line and the latter corresponds to a rectangle with missing corners; a phenomenon occurring due to the coupling between user's rates. Moreover, the individual secrecy capacity region is also fully characterized for the case where the eavesdropper's channel is deterministic. In addition to discrete memoryless setup, Gaussian scenarios are studied. For the Gaussian model, in addition to the strong and weak eavesdropper cases, the capacity region is characterized for the low and high SNR regimes when the eavesdropper's channel is stronger than one receiver but weaker than the other. Remarkably, positive secure transmission rates are always guaranteed under the individual secrecy constraint, unlike the case of the joint secrecy constraint (i.e., the information leakage rate from both messages to the eavesdropper is made vanishing). Thus, this notion of secrecy serves as an appropriate candidate for trading off secrecy level and transmission rate, making secrecy more affordable but still acceptable to the end user.
In this paper, we derive information-theoretic performance limits for secure and reliable communications over the general two-user discrete memoryless broadcast channel with side-information at the transmitter. The sender wishes to broadcast two independent messages to two receivers, under the constraint that each message should be kept confidential from the unintended receiver. Furthermore, the encoder has side-information - for example, fading in the wireless medium, interference caused by neighboring nodes in the network, etc. - provided to it in a noncausal manner, i.e., before the process of transmission. We derive an inner bound on the capacity region of this channel, by employing an extension of Marton's coding technique used for the classical two-user broadcast channel, in conjunction with a stochastic encoder to satisfy confidentiality constraints. Based on previously known results, we discuss a procedure to present a schematic of the achievable rate region. The rate-penalties for dealing with side-information and confidentiality constraints make the achievable region for this channel strictly smaller than the rate regions of those channels where one or both of these constraints are relaxed.
In this work, we investigate the problem of secure broadcasting over block-fading wiretap channels with limited channel knowledge at the transmitter. More particularly, we analyze the effect of having a finite rate feedback on the throughput of multi-user broadcast wiretap channels. We consider that the transmitter is only provided by a b -bits feedback of the main channel state information (CSI) sent by each legitimate receiver, at the beginning of each fading block, over error-free public links with limited capacity. Also, we assume that the transmitter is aware of the statistics of the eavesdropper's CSI but not of its channel's realizations. Under these assumptions of CSI uncertainty, we characterize the ergodic secrecy capacity of the system when a common message is broadcasted to all legitimate receivers, the ergodic secrecy sum-capacity when multiple independent messages are transmitted, and the ergodic secrecy capacity region for the broadcast channel with confidential messages (BCCM). In all three scenarios, we show that as long as the transmitter has some knowledge of the main CSI, obtained even through a 1-bit CSI feedback, a non-zero secrecy rate can still be achieved. The impact of having the feedback sent over a binary erasure channel (BEC) is also investigated for the BCCM case. Here again, and even with the possibility of having the feedback bits erased, a positive secrecy rate can still be achieved as long as the erasure event is not a probability-one event. An asymptotic analysis of the obtained results is provided for the high SNR regime, and the scaling law of the system, when the number of legitimate receivers is large, is also presented.