The capacity of the Gaussian wiretap channel model is analyzed when there are
multiple antennas at the sender, intended receiver and eavesdropper. The
associated channel matrices are fixed and known to all the terminals. A
computable characterization of the secrecy capacity is established as the
saddle point solution to a minimax problem. The converse is based on a
Sato-type argument used in other broadcast settings, and the coding theorem is
based on Gaussian wiretap codebooks.
At high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the secrecy capacity is shown to be
attained by simultaneously diagonalizing the channel matrices via the
generalized singular value decomposition, and independently coding across the
resulting parallel channels. The associated capacity is expressed in terms of
the corresponding generalized singular values. It is shown that a semi-blind
"masked" multi-input multi-output (MIMO) transmission strategy that sends
information along directions in which there is gain to the intended receiver,
and synthetic noise along directions in which there is not, can be arbitrarily
far from capacity in this regime.
Necessary and sufficient conditions for the secrecy capacity to be zero are
provided, which simplify in the limit of many antennas when the entries of the
channel matrices are independent and identically distributed. The resulting
scaling laws establish that to prevent secure communication, the eavesdropper
needs 3 times as many antennas as the sender and intended receiver have
jointly, and that the optimimum division of antennas between sender and
intended receiver is in the ratio of 2:1.Comment: To Appear, IEEE Trans. Information Theor