We investigate the problem of information theoretically secure communication in a line network with erasure channels and state feedback. We consider a spectrum of cases for the private randomness that intermediate nodes can generate, ranging from having intermediate nodes generate unlimited private randomness, to having intermediate nodes generate no private randomness, and all cases in between. We characterize the secret message capacity when either only one of the channels is eavesdropped or all of the channels are eavesdropped, and we develop polynomial time algorithms that achieve these capacities. We also give an outer bound for the case where an arbitrary number of channels is eavesdropped. Our work is the first to characterize the secrecy capacity of a network of arbitrary size, with imperfect channels and feedback.
We investigate the problem of information theoretically secure communication in a line network with erasure channels and state feedback. We consider a spectrum of cases for the private randomness that intermediate nodes can generate, ranging from having intermediate nodes generate unlimited private randomness, to having intermediate nodes generate no private randomness, and all cases in between. We characterize the secret message capacity when either only one of the channels is eavesdropped or all of the channels are eavesdropped, and we develop polynomial time algorithms that achieve these capacities. We also give an outer bound for the case where an arbitrary number of channels is eavesdropped. Our work is the first to characterize the secrecy capacity of a network of arbitrary size, with imperfect channels and feedback.
We investigate the problem of information theoretically secure communication in a line network with erasure channels and state feedback. We consider a spectrum of cases for the private randomness that intermediate nodes can generate, ranging from having intermediate nodes generate unlimited private randomness, to having intermediate nodes generate no private randomness, and all cases in between. We characterize the secret message capacity when either only one of the channels is eavesdropped or all of the channels are eavesdropped, and we develop polynomial time algorithms that achieve these capacities. We also give an outer bound for the case where an arbitrary number of channels is eavesdropped. Our work is the first to characterize the secrecy capacity of a network of arbitrary size, with imperfect channels and feedback. As a side result, we derive the secret key and secret message capacity of an one-hop network, when the source has limited randomness.
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 presents exact capacity characterizations for the case, when a principal, Alice, wants to securely send a message to another principal, Bob, over three network configurations: the parallel edges network, the V-network, and the triangle network. We assume that: 1) a passive eavesdropper, Eve, overhears any one edge in the network; 2) each edge corresponds to an independent broadcast packet erasure channel with arbitrary erasure probabilities; and 3) all legitimate nodes can publicly but causally acknowledge whether they received each packet or not. We develop optimal achievability schemes that are expressed as linear programs (LPs) and share a two-phase structure, where at the first phase, we create secret keys, and at the second phase, we use them to encrypt the transmitted message. Our outer bounds are also expressed through LP formulations. We prove that our schemes are optimal by showing that the optimal solution of the outer bound LP and the optimal solution of the achievability scheme LP coincide.
We characterize the secret message capacity of the triangle network, that consists of a source, a relay and a destination connected through orthogonal erasure channels. A passive eavesdropper, Eve, wiretaps any one of the three channels. The source and the relay can each generate unlimited private randomness; the relay and the destination can publicly provide strictly causal channel state information. Our achievable scheme is expressed through a linear program (LP) with 11 inequalities that captures a minimal set of secret key generation methods and the use of them for message encryption. Our outer bound is expressed also through a linear program, in this case with 41 constraints, constructed from general information inequalities. We prove that the optimal value of the outer bound LP is no larger than that of the scheme LP, which implies that the solution of the achievable scheme LP is the capacity. We find that equipping the relay with private randomness increases the secrecy rate by more than 40% in some cases and that cut-set bounds, directly applied in the network, are not always tight. Because the derivation of the inner and outer bound are both lengthy, we describe in this paper the achievability scheme, outline the outer bound, and provide the full derivations online [1]. We also make available Matlab functions that take as input the erasure probabilities and evaluate the inner and outer bounds.
The aim of information-theoretic secrecy is to ensure that an eavesdropper who listens to the wireless transmission of a message can only collect an arbitrarily small number of information bits about this message. In contrast to cryptography, there are no assumptions on the computational power of the eavesdropper. Information-theoretically secret communication has been studied for many particular wireless network topologies. In the main part of this thesis, we consider such communication for arbitrary acyclic wireless network topologies. We provide lower and upper bounds on the strong perfect secrecy capacity for the case when the channels of the network are either Gaussian or deterministic. These results are based on the recent understanding of the capacity of wireless networks (without secrecy constraints) by Avestimehr, Diggavi and Tse. As a side result, we give inner and outer bounds on the capacity region for the multisource problem in arbitrary wireless networks with Gaussian or deterministic signal interaction. For linear deterministic signal interaction, we find the exact capacity region. For Gaussian signal interaction, we are able to bound the gap between the two bounds on the capacity region. This gap depends only on the network topology, but not on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), which leads to an approximation of the capacity region for the high SNR regime. We further consider a particular network topology, called the fan-network, in which we assume that an eavesdropper has physical access to every node in a subset of the relay nodes. We give a general upper bound on the perfect secrecy capacity, and we characterize the perfect secrecy capacity for two special cases. In the second part of the thesis, we consider interactive secrecy, i.e., secrecy in the presence of a public feedback link from the destination to the source. We focus on the problem of secret key generation rather than secret communication. The benefit of public discussion for secret key generation in a broadcast channel was first shown by Maurer. We extend his ideas to a relay network called the line network, leading to a lower bound on the strongly secret key capacity for this network topology. Finally, we introduce a new channel coding setup called the interference-multiple access (IMA) channel. This channel is a variant of the interference channel where one of the receivers is required to decode the messages from both transmitters. We derive an inner bound on the capacity region of the IMA channel, as well as an outer bound for the so-called structured IMA channel. In a semi-deterministic version of the structured IMA channel, the bounds match, providing a characterization of the capacity region. In the Gaussian case, we obtain a 1 bit-approximation of the capacity region. We also show an inner bound on the equivocation-capacity region for the IMA channel, where we require that part of the private message for one receiver is kept information-theoretically secret from the other receiver.