Broadcast Channels with Privacy Leakage Constraints

TL;DR

This paper investigates the capacity limits of broadcast channels with privacy leakage constraints, deriving bounds and demonstrating how secrecy requirements influence achievable communication rates.

Contribution

It introduces new inner and outer bounds on the leakage-capacity region for broadcast channels with privacy constraints, generalizing previous results and employing a novel Uniform Approximation Lemma.

Findings

Bounds match for semi-deterministic and degraded BCs

Inner bound recovers Marton's region without leakage constraints

Leakage-capacity regions vary with secrecy scenarios

Abstract

The broadcast channel (BC) with one common and two private messages with leakage constraints is studied, where leakage rate refers to the normalized mutual information between a message and a channel symbol string. Each private message is destined for a different user and the leakage rate to the other receiver must satisfy a constraint. This model captures several scenarios concerning secrecy, i.e., when both, either or neither of the private messages are secret. Inner and outer bounds on the leakage-capacity region are derived when the eavesdropper knows the codebook. The inner bound relies on a Marton-like code construction and the likelihood encoder. A Uniform Approximation Lemma is established that states that the marginal distribution induced by the encoder on each of the bins in the Marton codebook is approximately uniform. Without leakage constraints the inner bound recovers Marton's region and the outer bound reduces to the UVW-outer bound. The bounds match for semi-deterministic (SD) and physically degraded (PD) BCs, as well as for BCs with a degraded message set. The leakage-capacity regions of the SD-BC and the BC with a degraded message set recover past results for different secrecy scenarios. A Blackwell BC example illustrates the results and shows how its leakage-capacity region changes from the capacity region without secrecy to the secrecy-capacity regions for different secrecy scenarios.