A Compressed Sensing Wire-Tap Channel

TL;DR

This paper investigates a compressed sensing inspired wire-tap channel, deriving bounds on secrecy capacity and revealing that the eavesdropper's limited ability to estimate sparse signals allows near-perfect secrecy even when they observe almost all information.

Contribution

It introduces a new model of wire-tap channels based on compressed sensing and provides tight bounds on secrecy capacity in large systems, showing near-perfect secrecy under certain conditions.

Findings

Secrecy capacity bounds are tight in large systems.

Eavesdropper's channel can be almost as good as the receiver's without compromising secrecy.

Small linear projections significantly hinder eavesdropper's sparse signal estimation.

Abstract

A multiplicative Gaussian wire-tap channel inspired by compressed sensing is studied. Lower and upper bounds on the secrecy capacity are derived, and shown to be relatively tight in the large system limit for a large class of compressed sensing matrices. Surprisingly, it is shown that the secrecy capacity of this channel is nearly equal to the capacity without any secrecy constraint provided that the channel of the eavesdropper is strictly worse than the channel of the intended receiver. In other words, the eavesdropper can see almost everything and yet learn almost nothing. This behavior, which contrasts sharply with that of many commonly studied wiretap channels, is made possible by the fact that a small number of linear projections can make a crucial difference in the ability to estimate sparse vectors.