3,397 research outputs found
Covert Bits Through Queues
We consider covert communication using a queuing timing channel in the
presence of a warden. The covert message is encoded using the inter-arrival
times of the packets, and the legitimate receiver and the warden observe the
inter-departure times of the packets from their respective queues. The
transmitter and the legitimate receiver also share a secret key to facilitate
covert communication. We propose achievable schemes that obtain non-zero covert
rate for both exponential and general queues when a sufficiently high rate
secret key is available. This is in contrast to other channel models such as
the Gaussian channel or the discrete memoryless channel where only
covert bits can be sent over channel uses, yielding
a zero covert rate.Comment: To appear at IEEE CNS, October 201
Information-theoretic Physical Layer Security for Satellite Channels
Shannon introduced the classic model of a cryptosystem in 1949, where Eve has
access to an identical copy of the cyphertext that Alice sends to Bob. Shannon
defined perfect secrecy to be the case when the mutual information between the
plaintext and the cyphertext is zero. Perfect secrecy is motivated by
error-free transmission and requires that Bob and Alice share a secret key.
Wyner in 1975 and later I.~Csisz\'ar and J.~K\"orner in 1978 modified the
Shannon model assuming that the channels are noisy and proved that secrecy can
be achieved without sharing a secret key. This model is called wiretap channel
model and secrecy capacity is known when Eve's channel is noisier than Bob's
channel.
In this paper we review the concept of wiretap coding from the satellite
channel viewpoint. We also review subsequently introduced stronger secrecy
levels which can be numerically quantified and are keyless unconditionally
secure under certain assumptions. We introduce the general construction of
wiretap coding and analyse its applicability for a typical satellite channel.
From our analysis we discuss the potential of keyless information theoretic
physical layer security for satellite channels based on wiretap coding. We also
identify system design implications for enabling simultaneous operation with
additional information theoretic security protocols
State of the cognitive interference channel: a new unified inner bound
The capacity region of the interference channel in which one transmitter
non-causally knows the message of the other, termed the cognitive interference
channel, has remained open since its inception in 2005. A number of subtly
differing achievable rate regions and outer bounds have been derived, some of
which are tight under specific conditions. In this work we present a new
unified inner bound for the discrete memoryless cognitive interference channel.
We show explicitly how it encompasses all known discrete memoryless achievable
rate regions as special cases. The presented achievable region was recently
used in deriving the capacity region of the general deterministic cognitive
interference channel, and thus also the linear high-SNR deterministic
approximation of the Gaussian cognitive interference channel. The high-SNR
deterministic approximation was then used to obtain the capacity of the
Gaussian cognitive interference channel to within 1.87 bits.Comment: Presented at the 2010 International Zurich Seminar on Communications
- an 2nd updated version
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
Distributed Channel Synthesis
Two familiar notions of correlation are rediscovered as the extreme operating
points for distributed synthesis of a discrete memoryless channel, in which a
stochastic channel output is generated based on a compressed description of the
channel input. Wyner's common information is the minimum description rate
needed. However, when common randomness independent of the input is available,
the necessary description rate reduces to Shannon's mutual information. This
work characterizes the optimal trade-off between the amount of common
randomness used and the required rate of description. We also include a number
of related derivations, including the effect of limited local randomness, rate
requirements for secrecy, applications to game theory, and new insights into
common information duality.
Our proof makes use of a soft covering lemma, known in the literature for its
role in quantifying the resolvability of a channel. The direct proof
(achievability) constructs a feasible joint distribution over all parts of the
system using a soft covering, from which the behavior of the encoder and
decoder is inferred, with no explicit reference to joint typicality or binning.
Of auxiliary interest, this work also generalizes and strengthens this soft
covering tool.Comment: To appear in IEEE Trans. on Information Theory (submitted Aug., 2012,
accepted July, 2013), 26 pages, using IEEEtran.cl
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