The problem of securing a network coding communication system against an eavesdropper adversary is considered. The network implements linear network coding to deliver n packets from source to each receiver, and the adversary can eavesdrop on μarbitrarily chosen links. The objective is to provide reliable communication to all receivers, while guaranteeing that the source information remains information-theoretically secure from the adversary. A coding scheme is proposed that can achieve the maximum possible rate of n-μpackets. The scheme, which is based on rank-metric codes, has the distinctive property of being universal: it can be applied on top of any communication network without requiring knowledge of or any modifications on the underlying network code. The only requirement of the scheme is that the packet length be at least n, which is shown to be strictly necessary for universal communication at the maximum rate. A further scenario is considered where the adversary is allowed not only to eavesdrop but also to inject up to t erroneous packets into the network, and the network may suffer from a rank deficiency of at most ρ. In this case, the proposed scheme can be extended to achieve the rate of n-ρ-2t-μpackets. This rate is shown to be optimal under the assumption of zero-error communication.
In the secure network coding for multicasting, there is loss of information rate due to inclusion of random bits at the source node. We show a method to eliminate that loss of information rate by using multiple statistically independent messages to be kept secret from an eavesdropper. The proposed scheme is an adaptation of Yamamoto et al.'s secure multiplex coding to the secure network coding.
In this paper we define the overflow problem of a network coding storage system in which the encoding parameter and the storage parameter are mismatched. Through analyses and experiments, we first show the impacts of the overflow problem in a network coding scheme, which not only waste storage spaces, but also degrade coding efficiency. To avoid the overflow problem, we then develop the network coding based secure storage (NCSS) scheme. Thanks to considering both security and storage requirements in encoding procedures and distributed architectures, the NCSS can improve the performance of a cl…
We determine the capacity region of the secure multiplex coding with a common message, and evaluate the mutual information and the equivocation rate of a collection of secret messages to the second receiver (eavesdropper), which were not evaluated by Yamamoto et al.
We extend the equivalence between network coding and index coding by Effros, El Rouayheb, and Langberg to the secure communication setting in the presence of an eavesdropper. Specifically, we show that the most general versions of secure network-coding setup by Chan and Grant and the secure index-coding setup by Dau, Skachek, and Chee, which also include the randomised encoding setting, are equivalent.
The problem of multilevel diversity coding with secure regeneration (MDC-SR) is considered, which includes the problems of multilevel diversity coding with regeneration (MDC-R) and secure regenerating code (SRC) as special cases. Two outer bounds are established, showing that separate coding of different messages using the respective SRCs can achieve the minimum-bandwidth-regeneration (MBR) point of the achievable normalized storage-capacity repair-bandwidth tradeoff regions for the general MDC-SR problem. The core of the new converse results is an exchange lemma, which can be established usin…
We consider the random linear precoder at the source node as a secure network coding. We prove that it is strongly secure in the sense of Harada and Yamamoto and universal secure in the sense of Silva and Kschischang, while allowing arbitrary small but nonzero mutual information to the eavesdropper. Our security proof allows statistically dependent and non-uniform multiple secret messages, while all previous constructions of weakly or strongly secure network coding assumed independent and uniform messages, which are difficult to be ensured in practice.
We study the index coding problem in the presence of an eavesdropper, where the aim is to communicate without allowing the eavesdropper to learn any single message aside from the messages it may already know as side information. We establish an outer bound on the underlying secure capacity region of the index coding problem, which includes polymatroidal and security constraints, as well as the set of additional decoding constraints for legitimate receivers. We then propose a secure variant of the composite coding scheme, which yields an inner bound on the secure capacity region of the index co…
It is known that a message can be transmitted safely against any wiretapper via a noisy channel without a secret key if the coding rate is less than the so-called secrecy capacity $C_S$, which is usually smaller than the channel capacity $C$. In order to remove the loss $C - C_S$, we propose a multiplex coding scheme with plural independent messages. In this paper, it is shown that the proposed multiplex coding scheme can attain the channel capacity as the total rate of the plural messages and the perfect secrecy for each message. The coding theorem is proved by extending Hayashi's proof, in w…
Inverse probability problems whose generative models are given by strictly nonlinear Gaussian random fields show the all-or-nothing behavior: There exists a critical rate at which Bayesian inference exhibits a phase transition. Below this rate, the optimal Bayesian estimator recovers the data perfectly, and above it the recovered data becomes uncorrelated. This study uses the replica method from the theory of spin glasses to show that this critical rate is the channel capacity. This interesting finding has a particular application to the problem of secure transmission: A strictly nonlinear Gau…
In this paper, we consider the problem of secure and reliable communication with uncertain channel state information (CSI) and present a new solution named active secure coding which combines the machine learning methods with the traditional physical layer secure coding scheme. First, we build a detectable wiretap channel model by combining the hidden Markov model with the compound wiretap channel model, in which the varying of channel block CSI is a Markov process and the detected information is a stochastic emission from the current CSI. Next, we present a CSI learning scheme to learn the CS…
Security aspects of the Index Coding with Side Information (ICSI) problem are investigated. Building on the results of Bar-Yossef et al. (2006), the properties of linear coding schemes for the ICSI problem are further explored. The notion of weak security, considered by Bhattad and Narayanan (2005) in the context of network coding, is generalized to block security. It is shown that the coding scheme for the ICSI problem based on a linear code C of length n, minimum distance d and dual distance d^\perp, is (d-1-t)-block secure (and hence also weakly secure) if the adversary knows in advance t \…
We construct a universal secure network coding. Our construction just modifies the transmission scheme at the source node and works with every linear coding at an intermediate node. We relax the security criterion such that the mutual information between the message and the eavesdropped signal is sufficiently small instead of strictly zero. Our construction allows the set of eavesdropped links to change at each time slot.
The secure multiplex coding (SMC) is a technique to remove rate loss in the coding for wire-tap channels and broadcast channels with confidential messages caused by the inclusion of random bits into transmitted signals. SMC replaces the random bits by other meaningful secret messages, and a collection of secret messages serves as the random bits to hide the rest of messages. In the previous researches, multiple secret messages were assumed to have independent and uniform distributions, which is difficult to be ensured in practice. We remove this restrictive assumption by a generalization of th…
A code equivalence between index coding and network coding was established, which shows that any index-coding instance can be mapped to a network-coding instance, for which any index code can be translated to a network code with the same decoding-error performance, and vice versa. Also, any network-coding instance can be mapped to an index-coding instance with a similar code translation. In this paper, we extend the equivalence to secure index coding and secure network coding, where eavesdroppers are present in the networks, and any code construction needs to guarantee security constraints in …
Index coding is concerned with efficient broadcast of a set of messages to receivers in the presence of receiver side information. In this paper, we study the secure index coding problem with security constraints on the receivers themselves. That is, for each receiver there is a single legitimate message it needs to decode and a prohibited message list, none of which should be decoded by that receiver. To this end, our contributions are threefold. We first introduce a secure linear coding scheme, which is an extended version of the fractional local partial clique covering scheme that was origi…
In this work, we study the secure index coding problem where there are security constraints on both legitimate receivers and eavesdroppers. We develop two performance bounds (i.e., converse results) on the symmetric secure capacity. The first one is an extended version of the basic acyclic chain bound (Liu and Sadeghi, 2019) that takes security constraints into account. The second converse result is a novel information-theoretic lower bound on the symmetric secure capacity, which is interesting as all the existing converse results in the literature for secure index coding give upper bounds on …
In network coding, information transmission often encounters wiretapping attacks. Secure network coding is introduced to prevent information from being leaked to adversaries. For secure linear network codes (SLNCs), the required field size is a very important index, because it largely determines the computational and space complexities of a SLNC, and it is also very important for the process of secure network coding from theoretical research to practical application. In this letter, we further discuss the required field size of SLNCs, and obtain a new lower bound. This bound shows that the fie…
Taking into account of both the huge computing power of intruders and untrusted cloud servers, we develop an enhanced secure pseudonym scheme to protect the privacy of mobile cloud data. To face the huge computing power challenge, we develop an unconditionally secure lightweight network coding pseudonym scheme. For the privacy issue of untrusted cloud server, we further design a two tier network coding to decouple the stored mobile cloud data from the owner pseudonyms. Therefore, our proposed network coding based pseudonym scheme can simultaneously defend against attackers from both outside an…
We study the secure decentralized Pliable Index CODing (PICOD) problem with circular side information sets at the users. The security constraint forbids every user to decode more than one message while a decentralized setting means there is no central transmitter in the system. Compared to the secure but centralized version of the problem, a converse bound from one of our previous works showed a factor of three difference in optimal code length under the constraint of linear encoding. In this paper, we first list the linearly infeasible cases, that is, problems where no linear code can simulta…
We investigate the construction of weakly-secure index codes for a sender to send messages to multiple receivers with side information in the presence of an eavesdropper. We derive a sufficient and necessary condition for the existence of index codes that are secure against an eavesdropper with access to any subset of messages of cardinality $t$, for any fixed $t$. In contrast to the benefits of using random keys in secure network coding, we prove that random keys do not promote security in three classes of index-coding instances.
It is common in the study of secure multicast network coding in the presence of an eavesdropper that has access to $z$ network links, to assume that the source node is the only node that generates random keys. In this setting, the secure multicast rate is well understood. Computing the secure multicast rate, or even the secure unicast rate, in the more general setting in which all network nodes may generate (independent) random keys is known to be as difficult as computing the (non-secure) capacity of multiple-unicast network coding instances --- a well known open problem. This work treats an …
The two-sender unicast index coding problem is the most fundamental multi-sender index coding problem. The two senders collectively cater to the demands of all the receivers, by taking advantage of the knowledge of their side-information. Each receiver demands a unique message and has some side-information. Weakly secure index coding problem is a practical version of the index coding problem in the presence of an eavesdropper. The eavesdropper can not gain any information about the messages he does not have, by listening to the senders' transmissions. We provide constructions of weakly secure …
We study secure source-coding with causal disclosure, under the Gaussian distribution. The optimality of Gaussian auxiliary random variables is shown in various scenarios. We explicitly characterize the tradeoff between the rates of communication and secret key. This tradeoff is the result of a mutual information optimization under Markov constraints. As a corollary, we deduce a general formula for Wyner's Common Information in the Gaussian setting.
In this paper, we propose a polar coding scheme for secure communication over the multiple-input, single-output, single-antenna eavesdropper (MISOSE) fading channel. We consider the case of block fading channels with known eavesdropper channel state information (CSI) and the case of fading channels with known eavesdropper channel distribution information (CDI). We use the artificial noise assisted secure precoding method to maximize the secrecy capacity in the first case, and to overcome the unawareness of the eavesdropper CSI in the second case. We show that our proposed scheme can provide bo…
We investigate two source coding problems with secrecy constraints. In the first problem we consider real--time fully secure transmission of a memoryless source. We show that although classical variable--rate coding is not an option since the lengths of the codewords leak information on the source, the key rate can be as low as the average Huffman codeword length of the source. In the second problem we consider causal source coding with a fidelity criterion and side information at the decoder and the eavesdropper. We show that when the eavesdropper has degraded side information, it is optimal …
This paper considers the problem of secure coding design for a type II wiretap channel, where the main channel is noiseless and the eavesdropper channel is a general binary-input symmetric-output memoryless channel. The proposed secure error-correcting code has a nested code structure. Two secure nested coding schemes are studied for a type II Gaussian wiretap channel. The nesting is based on cosets of a good code sequence for the first scheme and on cosets of the dual of a good code sequence for the second scheme. In each case, the corresponding achievable rate-equivocation pair is derived ba…
Multilevel diversity coding is a classical coding model where multiple mutually independent information messages are encoded, such that different reliability requirements can be afforded to different messages. It is well known that {\em superposition coding}, namely separately encoding the independent messages, is optimal for symmetric multilevel diversity coding (SMDC) (Yeung-Zhang 1999). In the current paper, we consider weakly secure SMDC where security constraints are injected on each individual message, and provide a complete characterization of the conditions under which superposition co…
In this work, the problem of transmitting an i.i.d Gaussian source over an i.i.d Gaussian wiretap channel with an i.i.d Gaussian side information is considered. The intended receiver is assumed to have a certain minimum SNR and the eavesdropper is assumed to have a strictly lower SNR compared to the intended receiver. The objective is minimizing the distortion of source reconstruction at the intended receiver. In this work, it is shown that unlike the Gaussian wiretap channel without side information, Shannon's source-channel separation coding scheme is not optimum in the sense of achieving th…
Wyner's work on wiretap channels and the recent works on information theoretic security are based on random codes. Achieving information theoretical security with practical coding schemes is of definite interest. In this note, the attempt is to overcome this elusive task by employing the polar coding technique of Arıkan. It is shown that polar codes achieve non-trivial perfect secrecy rates for binary-input degraded wiretap channels while enjoying their low encoding-decoding complexity. In the special case of symmetric main and eavesdropper channels, this coding technique achieves the secrecy …
This paper shows determining the secrecy capacity of a unicast network with uniform wiretap sets is at least as difficult as the k-unicast problem. In particular, we show that a general k-unicast problem can be reduced to the problem of finding the secrecy capacity of a corresponding single unicast network with uniform link capacities and one arbitrary wiretap link.
The adversarial wiretap channel (AWTC) model is a secure communication model in which adversary can directly read and write the transmitted bits in legitimate communication with fixed fractions. In this paper we propose a secure polar coding scheme to provide secure and reliable communication over the AWTC model. For the adversarial reading and writing action, we present a $ρ$ equivalent channel block and study its transformation under the channel polarization operation. We find that the generated channels are polarized in the sense that part of them are full-noise channels with probability al…
We consider secure multi-terminal source coding problems in the presence of a public helper. Two main scenarios are studied: 1) source coding with a helper where the coded side information from the helper is eavesdropped by an external eavesdropper; 2) triangular source coding with a helper where the helper is considered as a public terminal. We are interested in how the helper can support the source transmission subject to a constraint on the amount of information leaked due to its public nature. We characterize the tradeoff between transmission rate, incurred distortion, and information leak…
The universal secure network coding presented by Silva et al. realizes secure and reliable transmission of a secret message over any underlying network code, by using maximum rank distance codes. Inspired by their result, this paper considers the secure network coding based on arbitrary linear codes, and investigates its security performance and error correction capability that are guaranteed independently of the underlying network code. The security performance and error correction capability are said to be universal when they are independent of underlying network codes. This paper introduces…
We introduce a new protocol for secure two-party computation of linear functions in the semi-honest model, based on coding techniques. We first establish a parallel between the second version of the wire-tap channel model and secure two-party computation. This leads us to our protocol, that combines linear coset coding and oblivious transfer techniques. Our construction requires the use of binary intersecting codes or $q$-ary minimal codes, which are also studied in this paper.
Arithmetic Coding (AC) is widely used for the entropy coding of text and video data. It involves recursive partitioning of the range [0,1) in accordance with the relative probabilities of occurrence of the input symbols. A data (image or video) encryption scheme based on arithmetic coding called as Chaotic Arithmetic Coding (CAC) has been presented in previous works. In CAC, a large number of chaotic maps can be used to perform coding, each achieving Shannon optimal compression performance. The exact choice of map is governed by a key. CAC has the effect of scrambling the intervals without mak…
Symmetrical Multilevel Diversity Coding (SMDC) is a network compression problem introduced by Roche (1992) and Yeung (1995). In this setting, a simple separate coding strategy known as superposition coding was shown to be optimal in terms of achieving the minimum sum rate (Roche, Yeung, and Hau, 1997) and the entire admissible rate region (Yeung and Zhang, 1999) of the problem. This paper considers a natural generalization of SMDC to the secure communication setting with an additional eavesdropper. It is required that all sources need to be kept perfectly secret from the eavesdropper as long a…
In this paper, we investigate the secure coding issue for a wiretap channel model with fixed main channel and varying wiretap channel, by assuming that legitimate parties can obtain the wiretapping channel state information (CSI) after some time delay. For the symmetric degraded delay CSI case, we present an explicit weak security scheme by constructing secure polar codes on a one-time pad chaining structure, and prove its weak security, reliability and capability of approaching the secrecy capacity of perfect CSI case with delay CSI assumption. Further for the symmetric no-degraded delay CSI …
In this work, the problem of transmitting an i.i.d Gaussian source over an i.i.d Gaussian wiretap channel with an i.i.d Gaussian side information available at the intended receiver is considered. The intended receiver is assumed to have a certain minimum SNR and the eavesdropper is assumed to have a strictly lower SNR, compared to the intended receiver. The objective is to minimize the distortion of source reconstruction at the intended receiver. In this work, it is shown that the source-channel separation coding scheme is optimum in the sense of achieving minimum distortion. Two hybrid digita…
We consider the problem of secure communication over a network in the presence of wiretappers. We give a new cut-set bound on secrecy capacity which takes into account the contribution of both forward and backward edges crossing the cut, and the connectivity between their endpoints in the rest of the network. We show the bound is tight on a class of networks, which demonstrates that it is not possible to find a tighter bound by considering only cut set edges and their connectivity.
We consider the problem of securing a multicast network against a wiretapper that can intercept the packets on a limited number of arbitrary network edges of its choice. We assume that the network employs the network coding technique to simultaneously deliver the packets available at the source to all the receivers. We show that this problem can be looked at as a network generalization of the wiretap channel of type II introduced in a seminal paper by Ozarow and Wyner. In particular, we show that the transmitted information can be secured by using the Ozarow-Wyner approach of coset coding at t…
In this paper, we investigate the index coding problem in the presence of an eavesdropper. Messages are to be sent from one transmitter to a number of legitimate receivers who have side information about the messages, and share a set of secret keys with the transmitter. We assume perfect secrecy, meaning that the eavesdropper should not be able to retrieve any information about the message set. We study the minimum key lengths for zero-error and perfectly secure index coding problem. On one hand, this problem is a generalization of the index coding problem (and thus a difficult one). On the ot…
We investigate the combination between causal/zero-delay source coding and information-theoretic secrecy. Two source coding models with secrecy constraints are considered. We start by considering zero-delay perfectly secret lossless transmission of a memoryless source. We derive bounds on the key rate and coding rate needed for perfect zero-delay secrecy. In this setting, we consider two models which differ by the ability of the eavesdropper to parse the bit-stream passing from the encoder to the legitimate decoder into separate messages. We also consider causal source coding with a fidelity c…
We introduce a method for securely delivering a set of messages to a group of clients over a broadcast erasure channel where each client is interested in a distinct message. Each client is able to obtain its own message but not the others'. In the proposed method the messages are combined together using a special variant of random linear network coding. Each client is provided with a private set of decoding coefficients to decode its own message. Our method provides security for the transmission sessions against computational brute-force attacks and also weakly security in information theoreti…
This paper considers the problem of securing a linear network coding system against an adversary that is both an eavesdropper and a jammer. The network is assumed to transport n packets from source to each receiver, and the adversary is allowed to eavesdrop on μarbitrarily chosen links and also to inject up to t erroneous packets into the network. The goal of the system is to achieve zero-error communication that is information-theoretically secure from the adversary. Moreover, this goal must be attained in a universal fashion, i.e., regardless of the network topology or the underlying network…
We investigate the transmission of a secret message from Alice to Bob in the presence of an eavesdropper (Eve) and many of decode-and-forward relay nodes. Each link comprises a set of parallel channels, modeling for example an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing transmission. We consider the impact of discrete constellations and finite-length coding, defining an achievable secrecy rate under a constraint on the equivocation rate at Eve. Then we propose a power and channel allocation algorithm that maximizes the achievable secrecy rate by resorting to two coupled Gale-Shapley algorithms …
Silva et al. proposed a universal secure network coding scheme based on MRD codes, which can be applied to any underlying network code. This paper considers a stronger eavesdropping model where the eavesdroppers possess the ability to re-select the tapping links during the transmission. We give a proof for the impossibility of attaining universal security against such adversaries using Silva et al.'s code for all choices of code parameters, even with restricted number of tapped links. We also consider the cases with restricted tapping duration and derive some conditions for this code to be sec…
In the paradigm of network coding, the information-theoretic security problem is encountered in the presence of a wiretapper, who has capability of accessing an unknown channel-subset in communication networks. In order to combat this eavesdropping attack, secure network coding is introduced to prevent information from being leaked to adversaries. For any construction of secure linear network codes (SLNCs) over a wiretap network, the based field size is a very important index, because it largely determines the computational and space complexities, and further the efficiency of network transmis…
The paper studies the problem of securely storing biometric passwords, such as fingerprints and irises. With the help of coding theory Juels and Wattenberg derived in 1999 a scheme where similar input strings will be accepted as the same biometric. In the same time nothing could be learned from the stored data. They called their scheme a "fuzzy commitment scheme". In this paper we will revisit the solution of Juels and Wattenberg and we will provide answers to two important questions: What type of error-correcting codes should be used and what happens if biometric templates are not uniformly d…
We study the problem of reducing the communication overhead from a noisy wire-tap channel or storage system where data is encoded as a matrix, when more columns (or their linear combinations) are available. We present its applications to reducing communication overheads in universal secure linear network coding and secure distributed storage with crisscross errors and erasures and in the presence of a wire-tapper. Our main contribution is a method to transform coding schemes based on linear rank-metric codes, with certain properties, to schemes with lower communication overheads. By applying t…
In this paper, inner and outer bounds on the capacity region of two-user interference channels with two confidential messages have been proposed. By adding secure multiplex coding to the error correction method in [15] which achieves the best achievable capacity region for interference channel up to now, we have shown that the improved secure capacity region compared with [2] now is the whole Han-Kobayashi region. In addition, this construction not only removes the rate loss incurred by adding dummy messages to achieve security, but also change the original weak security condition in [2] to st…
Cryptographic protocols are often implemented at upper layers of communication networks, while error-correcting codes are employed at the physical layer. In this paper, we consider utilizing readily-available physical layer functions, such as encoders and decoders, together with shared keys to provide a threshold-type security scheme. To this end, we first consider a scenario where the effect of the physical layer is omitted and all the channels between the involved parties are assumed to be noiseless. We introduce a model for threshold-secure coding, where the legitimate parties communicate u…
This paper studies a variant of the Pliable Index CODing (PICOD) problem, i.e., an index coding problem where a user can be satisfied by decoding any message that is not in its side information set, where communication is decentralized, i.e., it occurs among users rather than by the central server, and secure, i.e., each user is allowed to decode only one message outside its side information set and must not be able to collect any information about any other message that is not its decoded one. Given the difficulty of the general version of this problem, this paper focuses on the case where th…
The problem of multilevel diversity coding with secure regeneration is revisited. Under the assumption that the eavesdropper can access the repair data for all compromised storage nodes, Shao el al. provided a precise characterization of the minimum-bandwidth-regeneration (MBR) point of the achievable normalized storage-capacity repair-bandwidth tradeoff region. In this paper, it is shown that the MBR point of the achievable normalized storage-capacity repair-bandwidth tradeoff region remains the same even if we assume that the eavesdropper can access the repair data for some compromised stora…
This paper characterizes the secret message capacity of three networks where two unicast sessions share some of the communication resources. Each network consists of erasure channels with state feedback. A passive eavesdropper is assumed to wiretap any one of the links. The capacity achieving schemes as well as the outer bounds are formulated as linear programs. The proposed strategies are then numerically evaluated and shown to achieve higher rate performances (up to a double single- or sum-rate) with respect to alternative strategies, where the network resources are time-shared among the two…
