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
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