Most of the existing information-theoretic secure key generation schemes have characterized maximum achievable secrecy rate or secrecy capacity over noiseless public broadcast channels. However, in many practical systems even legitimate nodes have to communicate over noisy channels. In this letter, we propose a secret key generation scheme based on secure network coding in Gaussian wiretap channels. We prove that even when the channel from the sender to the receiver is weaker than that to the eavesdropper, secret communication at a positive rate is still possible if the condition σ1<; √σ2/2 + σ 2/3 is satisfied. Moreover, we establish an upper bound on the secrecy leakage rate after privacy amplification using double-layered random coding and joint typicality encoding and decoding over noisy public channels. The proof of achievability and the converse is given to demonstrate that the proposed scheme can achieve information-theoretic security.
Most of the existing information-theoretic secure key generation schemes have characterized maximum achievable secrecy rate or secrecy capacity over noiseless public broadcast channels. However, in many practical systems even legitimate nodes have to communicate over noisy channels. In this letter, we propose a secret key generation scheme based on secure network coding in Gaussian wiretap channels. We prove that even when the channel from the sender to the receiver is weaker than that to the eavesdropper, secret communication at a positive rate is still possible if the condition σ1<; √σ2/2 + σ 2/3 is satisfied. Moreover, we establish an upper bound on the secrecy leakage rate after privacy amplification using double-layered random coding and joint typicality encoding and decoding over noisy public channels. The proof of achievability and the converse is given to demonstrate that the proposed scheme can achieve information-theoretic security.
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.
In this paper, we first consider a scenario where a source node wishes to broadcast two confidential messages for two respective receivers, while a wire-taper also receives the transmitted signal. We assume that the signals are transmitted over additive white Gaussian noise channels. We characterize the secrecy capacity region of this channel. Our achievable coding scheme is based on superposition coding and the random binning. We refer to this scheme as secret superposition coding. The converse proof combines the converse proof for the conventional Gaussian broadcast channel and the perfect secrecy constraint. This capacity region matches the capacity region of the broadcast channel without security constraint. It also matches the secrecy capacity of the wire-tap channel. Based on the rate characterization of the secure Gaussian broadcast channel, we then use a multilevel coding approach for the slowly fading wire-tap. We assume that the transmitter only knows the eavesdropper's channel. In this approach, source node sends secure layered coding and the receiver viewed as a continuum ordered users. We derive optimum power allocation for the layers which maximizes the total average rate.
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.
The wiretap channel with secret keys models the problem of secure communication in the presence of a non-legitimate eavesdropper, where the transmitter and legitimate receiver share a secret key of finite rate. This communication scenario is studied for compound channels. An achievable strong secrecy rate is presented and a multi-letter upper bound is derived. For degraded compound wiretap channels with secret keys the strong secrecy capacity is established. Finally, the case of channel state information at the transmitter is discussed and the secrecy capacity is established for this case as well.
Secure communication under channel uncertainty is an important and challenging problem in physical-layer security and cryptography. In this dissertation, we take a \nfundamental information-theoretic view at three concrete settings and use them to shed insight into efficient secure communication techniques for different scenarios under channel uncertainty. \n \nFirst, a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) Gaussian broadcast channel with two receivers and two messages: a common message intended for both receivers (i.e., channel \nuncertainty for decoding the common message at the receivers) and a confidential message intended for one of the receivers but needing to be kept asymptotically perfectly secret from the other is considered. A matrix characterization of the secrecy capacity region is established via a channel-enhancement argument and an extremal entropy inequality previously established for characterizing the capacity region of a degraded compound MIMO Gaussian broadcast channel. \n \nSecond, a multilevel security wiretap channel where there is one possible realization for the legitimate receiver channel but multiple possible realizations for the eavesdropper channel (i.e., channel uncertainty at the eavesdropper) is considered. A coding scheme is designed such that the number of secure bits delivered to the legitimate receiver depends on the actual realization of the eavesdropper channel. More specifically, when the eavesdropper channel realization is weak, all bits delivered to the legitimate receiver need to be secure. In addition, when the eavesdropper channel realization is strong, a prescribed part of the bits needs to remain secure. We call such codes security embedding codes, referring to the fact that high-security bits are now embedded into the low-security ones. We show that the key to achieving efficient security embedding is to jointly encode the low-security and high-security bits. In particular, the low-security bits can be used as (part of) the transmitter randomness to protect the high-security ones. \n \nFinally, motivated by the recent interest in building secure, robust and efficient distributed information storage systems, the problem of secure symmetrical multilevel diversity coding (S-SMDC) is considered. This is a setting where there are channel uncertainties at both the legitimate receiver and the eavesdropper. The problem of encoding individual sources is first studied. A precise characterization of the entire admissible rate region is established via a connection to the problem of secure coding over a three-layer wiretap network and utilizing some basic polyhedral structure of the admissible rate region. Building on this result, it is then shown that the simple coding strategy of separately encoding individual sources at the encoders can achieve the minimum sum rate for the general S-SMDC problem.
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.