5,729 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
Characterization of Information Channels for Asymptotic Mean Stationarity and Stochastic Stability of Non-stationary/Unstable Linear Systems
Stabilization of non-stationary linear systems over noisy communication
channels is considered. Stochastically stable sources, and unstable but
noise-free or bounded-noise systems have been extensively studied in
information theory and control theory literature since 1970s, with a renewed
interest in the past decade. There have also been studies on non-causal and
causal coding of unstable/non-stationary linear Gaussian sources. In this
paper, tight necessary and sufficient conditions for stochastic stabilizability
of unstable (non-stationary) possibly multi-dimensional linear systems driven
by Gaussian noise over discrete channels (possibly with memory and feedback)
are presented. Stochastic stability notions include recurrence, asymptotic mean
stationarity and sample path ergodicity, and the existence of finite second
moments. Our constructive proof uses random-time state-dependent stochastic
drift criteria for stabilization of Markov chains. For asymptotic mean
stationarity (and thus sample path ergodicity), it is sufficient that the
capacity of a channel is (strictly) greater than the sum of the logarithms of
the unstable pole magnitudes for memoryless channels and a class of channels
with memory. This condition is also necessary under a mild technical condition.
Sufficient conditions for the existence of finite average second moments for
such systems driven by unbounded noise are provided.Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Theor
Source-Channel Diversity for Parallel Channels
We consider transmitting a source across a pair of independent, non-ergodic
channels with random states (e.g., slow fading channels) so as to minimize the
average distortion. The general problem is unsolved. Hence, we focus on
comparing two commonly used source and channel encoding systems which
correspond to exploiting diversity either at the physical layer through
parallel channel coding or at the application layer through multiple
description source coding.
For on-off channel models, source coding diversity offers better performance.
For channels with a continuous range of reception quality, we show the reverse
is true. Specifically, we introduce a new figure of merit called the distortion
exponent which measures how fast the average distortion decays with SNR. For
continuous-state models such as additive white Gaussian noise channels with
multiplicative Rayleigh fading, optimal channel coding diversity at the
physical layer is more efficient than source coding diversity at the
application layer in that the former achieves a better distortion exponent.
Finally, we consider a third decoding architecture: multiple description
encoding with a joint source-channel decoding. We show that this architecture
achieves the same distortion exponent as systems with optimal channel coding
diversity for continuous-state channels, and maintains the the advantages of
multiple description systems for on-off channels. Thus, the multiple
description system with joint decoding achieves the best performance, from
among the three architectures considered, on both continuous-state and on-off
channels.Comment: 48 pages, 14 figure
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
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