Joint Source-Channel Secrecy Using Uncoded Schemes: Towards Secure Source Broadcast

TL;DR

This paper introduces permutation-based and orthogonal-transform-based uncoded schemes for joint source-channel secrecy in broadcast systems, achieving optimal secrecy and distortion performance in discrete and Gaussian scenarios.

Contribution

It proposes novel uncoded schemes that combine random permutations or orthogonal transforms with traditional methods, providing secrecy without performance loss and establishing bounds for their effectiveness.

Findings

The permutation-based scheme is optimal under certain conditions.

The schemes extend to Gaussian scenarios with comparable performance.

Uncoded schemes offer secrecy while maintaining distortion performance.

Abstract

This paper investigates a joint source-channel secrecy problem for the Shannon cipher broadcast system. We suppose list secrecy is applied, i.e., a wiretapper is allowed to produce a list of reconstruction sequences and the secrecy is measured by the minimum distortion over the entire list. For discrete communication cases, we propose a permutation-based uncoded scheme, which cascades a random permutation with a symbol-by-symbol mapping. Using this scheme, we derive an inner bound for the admissible region of secret key rate, list rate, wiretapper distortion, and distortions of legitimate users. For the converse part, we easily obtain an outer bound for the admissible region from an existing result. Comparing the outer bound with the inner bound shows that the proposed scheme is optimal under certain conditions. Besides, we extend the proposed scheme to the scalar and vector Gaussian communication scenarios, and characterize the corresponding performance as well. For these two cases, we also propose another uncoded scheme, orthogonal-transform-based scheme, which achieves the same performance as the permutation-based scheme. Interestingly, by introducing the random permutation or the random orthogonal transform into the traditional uncoded scheme, the proposed uncoded schemes, on one hand, provide a certain level of secrecy, and on the other hand, do not lose any performance in terms of the distortions for legitimate users.