New Parameters of Linear Codes Expressing Security Performance of Universal Secure Network Coding

The universal secure network coding presented by Silva et al. realizes secure and reliable transmission of a secret message over any underlying network code, by using maximum rank distance codes. Inspired by their result, this paper considers the secure network coding based on arbitrary linear codes, and investigates its security performance and error correction capability that are guaranteed independently of the underlying network code. The security performance and error correction capability are said to be universal when they are independent of underlying network codes. This paper introduces new code parameters, the relative dimension/intersection profile (RDIP) and the relative generalized rank weight (RGRW) of linear codes. We reveal that the universal security performance and universal error correction capability of secure network coding are expressed in terms of the RDIP and RGRW of linear codes. The security and error correction of existing schemes are also analyzed as applications of the RDIP and RGRW.Comment: IEEEtran.cls, 8 pages, no figure. To appear in Proc. 50th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing (Allerton 2012). Version 2 added an exact expression of the universal error correction capability in terms of the relative generalized rank weigh

Achievable rate region for three user discrete broadcast channel based on coset codes

We present an achievable rate region for the general three user discrete memoryless broadcast channel, based on nested coset codes. We characterize 3-to-1 discrete broadcast channels, a class of broadcast channels for which the best known coding technique\footnote{We henceforth refer to this as Marton's coding for three user discrete broadcast channel.}, which is obtained by a natural generalization of that proposed by Marton for the general two user discrete broadcast channel, is strictly sub-optimal. In particular, we identify a novel 3-to-1 discrete broadcast channel for which Marton's coding is \textit{analytically} proved to be strictly suboptimal. We present achievable rate regions for the general 3-to-1 discrete broadcast channels, based on nested coset codes, that strictly enlarge Marton's rate region for the aforementioned channel. We generalize this to present achievable rate region for the general three user discrete broadcast channel. Combining together Marton's coding and that proposed herein, we propose the best known coding technique, for a general three user discrete broadcast channel.Comment: A non-additive 3-user discrete broadcast channel is identified for which achievable rate region based on coset codes is analytically proven to be strictly larger than that achievable using unstructured iid codes. This version is submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Perfectly Secure Steganography: Capacity, Error Exponents, and Code Constructions

An analysis of steganographic systems subject to the following perfect undetectability condition is presented in this paper. Following embedding of the message into the covertext, the resulting stegotext is required to have exactly the same probability distribution as the covertext. Then no statistical test can reliably detect the presence of the hidden message. We refer to such steganographic schemes as perfectly secure. A few such schemes have been proposed in recent literature, but they have vanishing rate. We prove that communication performance can potentially be vastly improved; specifically, our basic setup assumes independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.) covertext, and we construct perfectly secure steganographic codes from public watermarking codes using binning methods and randomized permutations of the code. The permutation is a secret key shared between encoder and decoder. We derive (positive) capacity and random-coding exponents for perfectly-secure steganographic systems. The error exponents provide estimates of the code length required to achieve a target low error probability. We address the potential loss in communication performance due to the perfect-security requirement. This loss is the same as the loss obtained under a weaker order-1 steganographic requirement that would just require matching of first-order marginals of the covertext and stegotext distributions. Furthermore, no loss occurs if the covertext distribution is uniform and the distortion metric is cyclically symmetric; steganographic capacity is then achieved by randomized linear codes. Our framework may also be useful for developing computationally secure steganographic systems that have near-optimal communication performance.Comment: To appear in IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, June 2008; ignore Version 2 as the file was corrupte

Perfectly Secure Steganography: Capacity, Error Exponents, and Code Constructions

An analysis of steganographic systems subject to the following perfect undetectability condition is presented in this paper. Following embedding of the message into the covertext, the resulting stegotext is required to have exactly the same probability distribution as the covertext. Then no statistical test can reliably detect the presence of the hidden message. We refer to such steganographic schemes as perfectly secure. A few such schemes have been proposed in recent literature, but they have vanishing rate. We prove that communication performance can potentially be vastly improved; specifically, our basic setup assumes independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.) covertext, and we construct perfectly secure steganographic codes from public watermarking codes using binning methods and randomized permutations of the code. The permutation is a secret key shared between encoder and decoder. We derive (positive) capacity and random-coding exponents for perfectly-secure steganographic systems. The error exponents provide estimates of the code length required to achieve a target low error probability. We address the potential loss in communication performance due to the perfect-security requirement. This loss is the same as the loss obtained under a weaker order-1 steganographic requirement that would just require matching of first-order marginals of the covertext and stegotext distributions. Furthermore, no loss occurs if the covertext distribution is uniform and the distortion metric is cyclically symmetric; steganographic capacity is then achieved by randomized linear codes. Our framework may also be useful for developing computationally secure steganographic systems that have near-optimal communication performance.Comment: To appear in IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, June 2008; ignore Version 2 as the file was corrupte