Source-Channel Secrecy for Shannon Cipher System

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new lossy-equivocation secrecy measure for wiretap channels, establishes bounds on achievable secrecy rates, and demonstrates the optimality of separate schemes in certain cases, with extensions to Gaussian channels.

Contribution

It shows the equivalence between list secrecy and lossy-equivocation, derives bounds for the source-channel secrecy problem with noisy channels, and characterizes optimal schemes for special cases.

Findings

List secrecy is equivalent to lossy-equivocation.

Separate schemes are optimal for degraded wiretap channels.

Separation can cause performance loss in some scenarios.

Abstract

Recently, a secrecy measure based on list-reconstruction has been proposed [2], in which a wiretapper is allowed to produce a list of $2^{mR_{L}}$ reconstruction sequences and the secrecy is measured by the minimum distortion over the entire list. In this paper, we show that this list secrecy problem is equivalent to the one with secrecy measured by a new quantity \emph{lossy-equivocation}, which is proven to be the minimum optimistic 1-achievable source coding rate (the minimum coding rate needed to reconstruct the source within target distortion with positive probability for \emph{infinitely many blocklengths}) of the source with the wiretapped signal as two-sided information, and also can be seen as a lossy extension of conventional equivocation. Upon this (or list) secrecy measure, we study source-channel secrecy problem in the discrete memoryless Shannon cipher system with \emph{noisy} wiretap channel. Two inner bounds and an outer bound on the achievable region of secret key rate, list rate, wiretapper distortion, and distortion of legitimate user are given. The inner bounds are derived by using uncoded scheme and (operationally) separate scheme, respectively. Thanks to the equivalence between lossy-equivocation secrecy and list secrecy, information spectrum method is leveraged to prove the outer bound. As special cases, the admissible region for the case of degraded wiretap channel or lossless communication for legitimate user has been characterized completely. For both these two cases, separate scheme is proven to be optimal. Interestingly, however, separation indeed suffers performance loss for other certain cases. Besides, we also extend our results to characterize the achievable region for Gaussian communication case. As a side product optimistic lossy source coding has also been addressed.