We consider the fundamental limits of the secret key generation problem when the sources are excited by the sender. In many practical communication settings, the channel may be influenced by the parties involved. Similar to recent works on probing capacity and channels with action-dependent states, our system model captures such a scenario. We derive single-letter expressions for the secret key capacity. Our coding strategy involves wiretap channel coding and a key generation scheme. By assuming that the eavesdropper receives a degraded version of the legitimate receiver's observation, we also obtain a capacity result that does not involve any auxiliary random variables. Finally, by studying two examples, we show that there is a fundamental tradeoff in between the amount of common randomness (i.e., the secret key rate) and the wiretap secrecy rate.
We consider the fundamental limits of the secret key generation problem when the sources are excited by the sender. In many practical communication settings, the channel may be influenced by the parties involved. Similar to recent works on probing capacity and channels with action-dependent states, our system model captures such a scenario. We derive single-letter expressions for the secret key capacity. Our coding strategy involves wiretap channel coding and a key generation scheme. By assuming that the eavesdropper receives a degraded version of the legitimate receiver's observation, we also obtain a capacity result that does not involve any auxiliary random variables. Finally, by studying two examples, we show that there is a fundamental tradeoff in between the amount of common randomness (i.e., the secret key rate) and the wiretap secrecy rate.
We consider the secret key generation problem when sources are randomly excited by the sender and there is a noiseless public discussion channel. Our setting is thus similar to recent works on channels with action-dependent states, where the channel state may be influenced by some of the parties involved. We derive single-letter expressions for the secret key capacity through a type of source emulation analysis. We also derive lower bounds on the achievable reliability and secrecy exponents, i.e., the exponential rates of decay of the probability of decoding error and of the information leakage. These exponents allow us to determine a set of strongly achievable secret key rates. For degraded eavesdroppers, the maximum strongly achievable rate equals the secret key capacity; our exponents can also be specialized to previously known results. In deriving our strong achievability results, we introduce a coding scheme that combines wiretap coding (to excite the channel) and key extraction (to distill keys from residual randomness). The secret key capacity is naturally seen to be a combination of both source- and channel-type randomness. Through examples, we illustrate a fundamental interplay between the portion of the secret key rate due to each type of randomness. We also illustrate inherent tradeoffs between the achievable reliability and secrecy exponents. Our new scheme also naturally accommodates rate limits on the public discussion. We show that under rate constraints, we are able to achieve larger rates than those that can be attained through a pure source emulation strategy.
In Chapter 3, we considered the transmission of information over a noisy broadcast channel subject to reliability and security constraints; we showed that appropriate coding schemes can exploit the presence of noise to confuse the eavesdropper and guarantee some amount of information-theoretic security. It is important to note that the wiretap channel model assumes that all communications occur over the channel, hence communications are inherently rate-limited and one-way. Consequently, the results obtained do not fully capture the role of noise for secrecy; in particular, for situations in which the secrecy capacity is zero, it is not entirely clear whether this stems from the lack of any “physical advantage” over the eavesdropper or the restrictions imposed on the communication schemes. The objective of this chapter is to study more precisely the fundamental role of noise in information-theoretic security. Instead of studying how we can communicate messages securely over a noisy channel, we now analyze how much secrecy we can extract from the noise itself in the form of a secret key. Specifically, we assume that the legitimate parties and the eavesdropper observe the realizations of correlated random variables and that the legitimate parties attempt to agree on a secret key unknown to the eavesdropper. To isolate the role played by noise, we remove restrictions on communication schemes and we assume that the legitimate parties can distill their key by communicating over a two-way, public, noiseless , and authenticated channel at no cost.
We study secret-key agreement protocols over a wiretap channel controlled by a state parameter. The secret-key capacity is established when the wiretap channel is discrete and memoryless, the sender and receiver are both revealed the underlying state parameter, and no public discussion is allowed. An optimal coding scheme involves a two step approach — (i) design a wiretap codebook assuming that the state parameter is also known to the eavesdropper (ii) generate an additional secret key by exploiting the uncertainty of the state parameter at the eavesdropper. When unlimited public discussion is allowed between the legitimate terminals, we provide an upper bound on the secret-key capacity and establish its tightness when the channel outputs of the legitimate receiver and eavesdropper satisfy a conditional independence property. Numerical results for an on-off fading model suggest that the proposed coding schemes significantly outperform naive schemes that either disregard the contribution of the common state sequence or the contribution of the underlying channel.
Confidentiality of information is a key consideration in many networking applications, including e-commerce, online banking, and intelligence operations. How can information be communicated reliably to the legitimate users, while keeping it secret from eavesdroppers? How does such a secrecy constraint on communication affect the limits on information flow in the network? In this chapter, we study these questions under the information theoretic notion of secrecy, which requires each eavesdropper to obtain essentially no information about the messages sent from knowledge of its received sequence, the channel statistics, and the codebooks used. We investigate two approaches to achieve secure communication. The first is to exploit the statistics of the channel from the sender to the legitimate receivers and the eavesdroppers. We introduce the wiretap channel as a 2-receiver broadcast channel with a legitimate receiver and an eavesdropper, and establish its secrecy capacity, which is the highest achievable secret communication rate. The idea is to design the encoder so that the channel from the sender to the receiver becomes effectively stronger than the channel to the eavesdropper; hence the receiver can recover the message but the eavesdropper cannot. This wiretap coding scheme involves multicoding and randomized encoding. If the channel from the sender to the receiver is weaker than that to the eavesdropper, however, secret communication at a positive rate is not possible. This brings us to the second approach to achieve secret communication, which is to use a secret key shared between the sender and the receiver but unknown to the eavesdropper. We show that the rate of such secret key must be at least as high as the rate of the confidential message. This raises the question of how the sender and the receiver can agree on such a long secret key in the first place. After all, if they had a confidential channel with sufficiently high capacity to communicate the key, then why not use it to communicate the message itself! We show that if the sender and the receiver have access to correlated sources (e.g., through a satellite beaming common randomness to them), then they can still agree on a secret key even when the channel has zero secrecy capacity. We first consider the source model for key agreement, where the sender communicates with the receiver over a noiseless public broadcast channel to generate a secret key from their correlated sources.
Abstract—We study the secret-key capacity in a joint source-channel coding setup—the terminals are connected over a discrete memoryless channel and have access to side information, modelled as a pair of discrete memoryless source sequences. As our main result, we establish the upper and lower bounds on the secret-key capacity. In the lower bound expression, the equivocation terms of the source and channel components are functionally additive even though the coding scheme generates a single secret-key by jointly taking into account the source and channel equivocations. Our bounds coincide, thus establishing the capacity, when the underlying wiretap channel can be decomposed into a set of independent, parallel, and reversely degraded channels. For the case of parallel Gaussian channels and jointly Gaussian sources we show that Gaussian codebooks achieve the secret-key capacity. In addition, when the eavesdropper also observes a correlated side information sequence, we establish the secret-key capacity when both the source and channel of the eavesdropper are a degraded version of the legitimate receiver. We finally also treat the case when a public discussion channel is available, propose a separation based coding scheme, and establish its optimality when the channel output symbols of the legitimate receiver and eavesdropper are conditionally independent given the input. Index Terms—Information theoretic security, joint sourcechannel coding, public discussion, secret-key agreement, wiretap channel. I.
Secret-key agreement protocols over wiretap channels controlled by a state parameter are studied. The entire state sequence is known (non-causally) to the sender but not to the receiver and the eavesdropper. Upper and lower bounds on the secret-key capacity are established both with and without public discussion. The proposed coding scheme involves constructing a codebook to create common reconstruction of the state sequence at the sender and the receiver and another secret-key codebook constructed by random binning. For the special case of Gaussian channels, with no public discussion, - the secret-key generation with dirty paper problem, the gap between our bounds is at-most 1/2 bit and the bounds coincide in the high signal-to-noise ratio and high interference-to-noise ratio regimes. In the presence of public discussion our bounds coincide, yielding the capacity, when then the channels of the receiver and the eavesdropper satisfy an in- dependent noise condition.