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Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing

Multiterminal secure source coding for a common secret source

Chung Chan

Published Sep 1, 2011• 8 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A multiterminal secure source coding problem is proposed where multiple users discuss in public until they can recover a particular source as securely as possible. The model provides a unified framework that combines and generalizes the problems of multiterminal secret key agreement and secure computation. Bounds on the achievable discussion rate, level of secrecy and reliability are derived.

DOI
10.1109/allerton.2011.6120167

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A multiterminal secure source coding problem is proposed where multiple users discuss in public until they can recover a particular source as securely as possible. The model provides a unified framework that combines and generalizes the problems of multiterminal secret key agreement and secure computation. Bounds on the achievable discussion rate, level of secrecy and reliability are derived.
The multiterminal secret key agreement problem by public discussion is formulated with an additional source compression step where, prior to the public discussion phase, users independently compress their private sources to filter out strongly correlated components in order to generate a common secret key. The objective is to maximize the achievable key rate as a function of the joint entropy of the compressed sources. Since the maximum achievable key rate captures the total amount of information mutual to the compressed sources, an optimal compression scheme essentially maximizes the multivariate mutual information per bit of randomness of the private sources, and can therefore be viewed more generally as a dimension reduction technique. Single-letter lower and upper bounds on the maximum achievable key rate are derived for the general source model, and an explicit polynomial-time computable formula is obtained for the pairwise independent network model. In particular, the converse results and the upper bounds are obtained from those of the related secret key agreement problem with rate-limited discussion. A precise duality is shown for the two-user case with one-way discussion, and such duality is extended to obtain the desired converse results in the multi-user case. In addition to posing new challenges in information processing and dimension reduction, the compressed secret key agreement problem helps shed new light on resolving the difficult problem of secret key agreement with rate-limited discussion by offering a more structured achieving scheme and some simpler conjectures to prove.
For the multiterminal secret key agreement problem, new single-letter lower bounds are obtained on the minimum public discussion rate required to achieve any given secret key rate below the secrecy capacity. The results apply to the general source model without helpers or wiretapper's side information, but can be strengthened for hypergraphical sources. In particular, for the pairwise independent network, our results yield a complete characterization of the maximum secret key rate achievable under a constraint on the total discussion rate.
In the multiterminal secret key agreement problem, a set of users want to discuss with each other until they share a common secret key independent of their discussion. We want to characterize the maximum secret key rate, called the secrecy capacity, asymptotically when the total discussion rate goes to zero. In the case of only two users, the capacity is equal to the Gács-Körner common information. However, when there are more than two users, the capacity is unknown. It is plausible that a multivariate extension of the Gács-Kömer common information is the capacity, however, proving the converse is challenging. We resolved this for the hypergraphical sources and finite linear sources, and provide efficiently computable characterizations. We also give some ideas of extending the techniques to more general source models.
For the multiterminal secret key agreement problem under a private source model, it is known that the maximum key rate, i.e., the secrecy capacity, can be achieved through communication for omniscience, but the omniscience strategy can be strictly suboptimal in terms of minimizing the public discussion rate. While a single-letter characterization is not known for the minimum discussion rate needed for achieving the secrecy capacity, we derive single-letter lower bounds that yield some simple conditions for omniscience to be discussion-rate optimal. These conditions turn out to be enough to deduce the optimality of omniscience for a large class of sources, including the hypergraphical sources. We also extend our results to more general class of multiterminal sources with helpers and silent users.
This monograph describes principles of information theoretic secrecy generation by legitimate parties with public discussion in the presence of an eavesdropper. The parties are guaranteed secrecy in the form of independence from the eavesdropper’s observation of the communication. Part I develops basic technical tools for secrecy generation, many of which are potentially of independent interest beyond secrecy settings. Various information theoretic and cryptographic notions of secrecy are compared. Emphasis is placed on central themes of interactive communication and common randomness as well as on core methods of balanced coloring and leftover hash for extracting secret uniform randomness. Achievability and converse results are shown to emerge from “single shot” incarnations that serve to explain essential structure. Part II applies the methods of Part I to secrecy generation in two settings: a multiterminal source model and a multiterminal channel model, in both of which the legitimate parties are afforded privileged access to correlated observations of which the eavesdropper has only partial knowledge. Characterizations of secret key capacity bring out inherent connections to the data compression concept of omniscience and, for a specialized source model, to a combinatorial problem of maximal spanning tree packing in a multigraph. Interactive common information is seen to govern the minimum rate of communication needed to achieve secret key capacity in the two-terminal source model. Furthermore, necessary and sufficient conditions are analyzed for the secure computation of a given function in the multiterminal source model. Based largely on known recent results, this self-contained monograph also includes new formulations with associated new proofs. Supplementing each chapter in Part II are descriptions of several open problems.