Empirical and Strong Coordination via Soft Covering with Polar Codes

We design polar codes for empirical coordination and strong coordination in two-node networks. Our constructions hinge on the fact that polar codes enable explicit low-complexity schemes for soft covering. We leverage this property to propose explicit and low-complexity coding schemes that achieve the capacity regions of both empirical coordination and strong coordination for sequences of actions taking value in an alphabet of prime cardinality. Our results improve previously known polar coding schemes, which (i) were restricted to uniform distributions and to actions obtained via binary symmetric channels for strong coordination, (ii) required a non-negligible amount of common randomness for empirical coordination, and (iii) assumed that the simulation of discrete memoryless channels could be perfectly implemented. As a by-product of our results, we obtain a polar coding scheme that achieves channel resolvability for an arbitrary discrete memoryless channel whose input alphabet has prime cardinality.Comment: 14 pages, two-column, 5 figures, accepted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Polar Coding for Secret-Key Generation

Practical implementations of secret-key generation are often based on sequential strategies, which handle reliability and secrecy in two successive steps, called reconciliation and privacy amplification. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach based on polar codes that jointly deals with reliability and secrecy. Specifically, we propose secret-key capacity-achieving polar coding schemes for the following models: (i) the degraded binary memoryless source (DBMS) model with rate-unlimited public communication, (ii) the DBMS model with one-way rate-limited public communication, (iii) the 1-to-m broadcast model and (iv) the Markov tree model with uniform marginals. For models (i) and (ii) our coding schemes remain valid for non-degraded sources, although they may not achieve the secret-key capacity. For models (i), (ii) and (iii), our schemes rely on pre-shared secret seed of negligible rate; however, we provide special cases of these models for which no seed is required. Finally, we show an application of our results to secrecy and privacy for biometric systems. We thus provide the first examples of low-complexity secret-key capacity-achieving schemes that are able to handle vector quantization for model (ii), or multiterminal communication for models (iii) and (iv).Comment: 26 pages, 9 figures, accepted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory; parts of the results were presented at the 2013 IEEE Information Theory Worksho

Coding Schemes for Achieving Strong Secrecy at Negligible Cost

We study the problem of achieving strong secrecy over wiretap channels at negligible cost, in the sense of maintaining the overall communication rate of the same channel without secrecy constraints. Specifically, we propose and analyze two source-channel coding architectures, in which secrecy is achieved by multiplexing public and confidential messages. In both cases, our main contribution is to show that secrecy can be achieved without compromising communication rate and by requiring only randomness of asymptotically vanishing rate. Our first source-channel coding architecture relies on a modified wiretap channel code, in which randomization is performed using the output of a source code. In contrast, our second architecture relies on a standard wiretap code combined with a modified source code termed uniform compression code, in which a small shared secret seed is used to enhance the uniformity of the source code output. We carry out a detailed analysis of uniform compression codes and characterize the optimal size of the shared seed.Comment: 15 pages, two-column, 5 figures, accepted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Private Information Retrieval with Private Noisy Side Information

Consider Private Information Retrieval (PIR), where a client wants to retrieve one file out of $K$ files that are replicated in $N$ different servers and the client selection must remain private when up to $T$ servers may collude. Additionally, suppose that the client has noisy side information about each of the $K$ files, and the side information about a specific file is obtained by passing this file through one of $D$ possible discrete memoryless test channels, where $D\le K$. While the statistics of the test channels are known by the client and by all the servers, the specific mapping $\boldsymbol{\mathcal{M}}$ between the files and the test channels is unknown to the servers. We study this problem under two different privacy metrics. Under the first privacy metric, the client wants to preserve the privacy of its desired file selection and the mapping $\boldsymbol{\mathcal{M}}$. Under the second privacy metric, the client wants to preserve the privacy of its desired file and the mapping $\boldsymbol{\mathcal{M}}$, but is willing to reveal the index of the test channel that is associated to its desired file. For both of these two privacy metrics, we derive the optimal normalized download cost. Our problem setup generalizes PIR with colluding servers, PIR with private noiseless side information, and PIR with private side information under storage constraints

Explicit Wiretap Channel Codes via Source Coding, Universal Hashing, and Distribution Approximation, When the Channels' Statistics are Uncertain

We consider wiretap channels with uncertainty on the eavesdropper channel under (i) noisy blockwise type II, (ii) compound, or (iii) arbitrarily varying models. We present explicit wiretap codes that can handle these models in a unified manner and only rely on three primitives, namely source coding with side information, universal hashing, and distribution approximation. Our explicit wiretap codes achieve the best known single-letter achievable rates, previously obtained non-constructively, for the models considered. Our results are obtained for strong secrecy, do not require a pre-shared secret between the legitimate users, and do not require any symmetry properties on the channel. An extension of our results to compound main channels is also derived via new capacity-achieving polar coding schemes for compound settings.Comment: 16 pages, two-column, 3 figures, accepted to IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Securit