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arXiv:2308.09031

New Properties of Intrinsic Information and Their Relation to Bound Secrecy

Andrey Boris Khesin, Andrew Tung, Karthik Vedula

Published Aug 17, 2023• 1 citation
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Abstract

The secret-key rate measures the rate at which Alice and Bob can extract secret bits from sampling a joint probability distribution, unknown to an eavesdropper Eve. The secret-key rate has been bounded above by the intrinsic information and reduced intrinsic information. However, we prove that the reduced intrinsic information is 0 if and only if the intrinsic information is 0. This result implies that at least one of the following two conjectures is false: bound secrecy exists, or the reduced intrinsic information equals the secret-key rate. We give an explicit construction of an information-erasing binarization for a candidate for bound secrecy. We then introduce some approaches for proving the existence of bound secrecy, such as reducing the channel space, linearly transforming Bob's map, and perturbing a channel for Eve.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2308.09031

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The secret-key rate measures the rate at which Alice and Bob can extract secret bits from sampling a joint probability distribution, unknown to an eavesdropper Eve. The secret-key rate has been bounded above by the intrinsic information and reduced intrinsic information. However, we prove that the reduced intrinsic information is 0 if and only if the intrinsic information is 0. This result implies that at least one of the following two conjectures is false: bound secrecy exists, or the reduced intrinsic information equals the secret-key rate. We give an explicit construction of an information-erasing binarization for a candidate for bound secrecy. We then introduce some approaches for proving the existence of bound secrecy, such as reducing the channel space, linearly transforming Bob's map, and perturbing a channel for Eve.
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This paper is concerned with secret-key agreement by public discussion. Assume that two parties Alice and Bob and an adversary Eve have access to independent realizations of random variables X, Y, and Z, respectively, with joint distribution P/sub XYZ/. The secret-key rate S(X;Y/spl par/Z) has been defined as the maximal rate at which Alice and Bob can generate a secret key by communication over an insecure, but authenticated channel such that Eve's information about this key is arbitrarily small. We define a new conditional mutual information measure, the intrinsic conditional mutual information between S and Y when given Z, denoted by I(X;Y/spl darr/Z), which is an upper bound on S(X;Y/spl par/Z). The special scenarios are analyzed where X, Y, and Z are generated by sending a binary random variable R, for example a signal broadcast by a satellite, over independent channels, or two scenarios in which Z is generated by sending X and Y over erasure channels. In the first two scenarios it can be shown that the secret-key rate is strictly positive if and only if I(X;Y/spl darr/Z) is strictly positive. For the third scenario, a new protocol is presented which allows secret-key agreement even when all the previously known protocols fail.
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We consider a secret communication scenario where Alice wants to transmit secretly to Bob in presence of a passive eavesdropper Eve. The Alice-Bob channel is a fixed-SNR AWGN channel, while the Alice-Eve channel is a fast Rayleigh fading channel, with the channel states only known to Eve. Alice knows the statistics of Alice-Eve channel, but not the exact realizations. We investigate the achievable secrecy rates for this channel model with Gaussian signaling and discrete signaling. For Gaussian signaling, several transmission strategies according to the main channel's relative channel gain are proposed and evaluated. For discrete signaling, achievable secrecy rates with Quadrature Am- plitude Modulation (QAM) are evaluated. When Bob's channel is much better than Eve's channel, simple Gaussian signaling can perform close to the upper bound, and is better than the rate achieved with M-QAM. When Bob's channel gain is on average worse than the eavesdropper's average channel gain, positive secrecy rate can still be achieved for Gaussian signaling with artificial noise injection and a burst signaling strategy. Moreover, M-QAM can outperform Gaussian signaling. The key factor that enables secret communication in this case is that both M-QAM and artificial noise limit the leakage of information when Eve's channel is unusually good.
Consider a scenario in which two parties Alice and Bob as well as an opponent Eve receive the output of a binary symmetric source (e,g. installed in a satellite) over individual, not necessarily independent binary symmetric channels. Alice and Bob share no secret key initially and can only communicate over a public channel completely accessible to Eve. The authors derive a lower bound on the rate at which Alice and Bob can generate secret-key bits about which Eve has arbitrarily little information, This lower bound is strictly positive as long as Eve's binary symmetric channel is not perfect, even if Alice's and Bob's channels are by orders of magnitude less reliable than Eve's channel.>
Alice and Bob want to share a secret key and to communicate an independent message, both of which they desire to be kept secret from an eavesdropper Eve. We study this problem of secret communication and secret key generation when two resources are available – correlated sources at Alice, Bob, and Eve, and a noisy broadcast channel from Alice to Bob and Eve which is independent of the sources. We are interested in characterizing the fundamental trade-off between the rates of the secret message and secret key. We present an achievable solution and prove its optimality for the parallel channels and sources case when each sub-channel and source component satisfies a degradation order (either in favor of the legitimate receiver or the eavesdropper). This includes the case of jointly Gaussian sources and an additive Gaussian channel, for which the secrecy region is evaluated. I.