100 research outputs found
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
Capacity and Random-Coding Exponents for Channel Coding with Side Information
Capacity formulas and random-coding exponents are derived for a generalized
family of Gel'fand-Pinsker coding problems. These exponents yield asymptotic
upper bounds on the achievable log probability of error. In our model,
information is to be reliably transmitted through a noisy channel with finite
input and output alphabets and random state sequence, and the channel is
selected by a hypothetical adversary. Partial information about the state
sequence is available to the encoder, adversary, and decoder. The design of the
transmitter is subject to a cost constraint. Two families of channels are
considered: 1) compound discrete memoryless channels (CDMC), and 2) channels
with arbitrary memory, subject to an additive cost constraint, or more
generally to a hard constraint on the conditional type of the channel output
given the input. Both problems are closely connected. The random-coding
exponent is achieved using a stacked binning scheme and a maximum penalized
mutual information decoder, which may be thought of as an empirical generalized
Maximum a Posteriori decoder. For channels with arbitrary memory, the
random-coding exponents are larger than their CDMC counterparts. Applications
of this study include watermarking, data hiding, communication in presence of
partially known interferers, and problems such as broadcast channels, all of
which involve the fundamental idea of binning.Comment: to appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, without
Appendices G and
Authentication with Distortion Criteria
In a variety of applications, there is a need to authenticate content that
has experienced legitimate editing in addition to potential tampering attacks.
We develop one formulation of this problem based on a strict notion of
security, and characterize and interpret the associated information-theoretic
performance limits. The results can be viewed as a natural generalization of
classical approaches to traditional authentication. Additional insights into
the structure of such systems and their behavior are obtained by further
specializing the results to Bernoulli and Gaussian cases. The associated
systems are shown to be substantially better in terms of performance and/or
security than commonly advocated approaches based on data hiding and digital
watermarking. Finally, the formulation is extended to obtain efficient layered
authentication system constructions.Comment: 22 pages, 10 figure
Binary Hypothesis Testing Game with Training Data
We introduce a game-theoretic framework to study the hypothesis testing
problem, in the presence of an adversary aiming at preventing a correct
decision. Specifically, the paper considers a scenario in which an analyst has
to decide whether a test sequence has been drawn according to a probability
mass function (pmf) P_X or not. In turn, the goal of the adversary is to take a
sequence generated according to a different pmf and modify it in such a way to
induce a decision error. P_X is known only through one or more training
sequences. We derive the asymptotic equilibrium of the game under the
assumption that the analyst relies only on first order statistics of the test
sequence, and compute the asymptotic payoff of the game when the length of the
test sequence tends to infinity. We introduce the concept of
indistinguishability region, as the set of pmf's that can not be distinguished
reliably from P_X in the presence of attacks. Two different scenarios are
considered: in the first one the analyst and the adversary share the same
training sequence, in the second scenario, they rely on independent sequences.
The obtained results are compared to a version of the game in which the pmf P_X
is perfectly known to the analyst and the adversary
Sparse Regression Codes for Multi-terminal Source and Channel Coding
We study a new class of codes for Gaussian multi-terminal source and channel
coding. These codes are designed using the statistical framework of
high-dimensional linear regression and are called Sparse Superposition or
Sparse Regression codes. Codewords are linear combinations of subsets of
columns of a design matrix. These codes were recently introduced by Barron and
Joseph and shown to achieve the channel capacity of AWGN channels with
computationally feasible decoding. They have also recently been shown to
achieve the optimal rate-distortion function for Gaussian sources. In this
paper, we demonstrate how to implement random binning and superposition coding
using sparse regression codes. In particular, with minimum-distance
encoding/decoding it is shown that sparse regression codes attain the optimal
information-theoretic limits for a variety of multi-terminal source and channel
coding problems.Comment: 9 pages, appeared in the Proceedings of the 50th Annual Allerton
Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing - 201
Towards joint decoding of binary Tardos fingerprinting codes
The class of joint decoder of probabilistic fingerprinting codes is of utmost
importance in theoretical papers to establish the concept of fingerprint
capacity. However, no implementation supporting a large user base is known to
date. This article presents an iterative decoder which is, as far as we are
aware of, the first practical attempt towards joint decoding. The
discriminative feature of the scores benefits on one hand from the
side-information of previously accused users, and on the other hand, from
recently introduced universal linear decoders for compound channels. Neither
the code construction nor the decoder make precise assumptions about the
collusion (size or strategy). The extension to incorporate soft outputs from
the watermarking layer is straightforward. An extensive experimental work
benchmarks the very good performance and offers a clear comparison with
previous state-of-the-art decoders.Comment: submitted to IEEE Trans. on Information Forensics and Security. -
typos corrected, one new plot, references added about ECC based
fingerprinting code
- …