We consider a model for secrecy generation, with three terminals, by means of public interterminal communication, and examine the problem of characterizing all the rates at which all three terminals can generate a ``secret key,'' and -- simultaneously -- two designated terminals can generate a ``private key'' which is effectively concealed from the remaining terminal; both keys are also concealed from an eavesdropper that observes the public communication. Inner and outer bounds for the ``secret key--private key capacity region'' are derived. Under a certain special condition, these bounds coincide to yield the (exact) secret key--private key capacity region.
We consider secret key generation for a "pairwise independent network" model in which every pair of terminals observes correlated sources that are independent of sources observed by all other pairs of terminals. The terminals are then allowed to communicate publicly with all such communication being observed by all the terminals. The objective is to generate a secret key shared by a given subset of terminals at the largest rate possible, with the cooperation of any remaining terminals. Secrecy is required from an eavesdropper that has access to the public interterminal communication. A (single…
A new scenario for generating a secret key and two private keys among three Terminals in the presence of an external eavesdropper is considered. Terminals 1, 2 and 3 intend to share a common secret key concealed from the external eavesdropper (Terminal 4) and simultaneously, each of Terminals 1 and 2 intends to share a private key with Terminal 3 while keeping it concealed from each other and from Terminal 4. All four Terminals observe i.i.d. outputs of correlated sources and there is a public channel from Terminal 3 to Terminals 1 and 2. An inner bound of the "secret key-private keys capacity…
We consider a non-asymptotic (one-shot) version of the multiterminal secret key agreement problem on a finite linear source model. In this model, the observation of each terminal is a linear function of an underlying random vector composed of finitely many i.i.d. uniform random variables. Restricting the public discussion to be a linear function of the terminals' observations, we obtain a characterization of the communication complexity (minimum number of symbols of public discussion) of generating a secret key of maximum length. The minimum discussion is achieved by a non-interactive protocol…
The problem of simultaneously generating a secret key (SK) and private key (PK) pair among three terminals via public discussion is investigated, in which each terminal observes a component of correlated sources. All three terminals are required to generate a common secret key concealed from an eavesdropper that has access to public discussion, while two designated terminals are required to generate an extra private key concealed from both the eavesdropper and the remaining terminal. An outer bound on the SK-PK capacity region was established in [1], and was shown to be achievable for one case…
We consider a pair-wise independent network where every pair of terminals in the network observes a common pair-wise source that is independent of all the sources accessible to the other pairs. We propose a method for secret key agreement in such a network that is based on well-established point-to-point techniques and repeated application of the one-time pad. Three specific problems are investigated. 1) Each terminal's observations are correlated only with the observations of a central terminal. All these terminals wish to generate a common secret key. 2) In a pair-wise independent network, t…
A new model of multi-party secret key agreement is proposed, in which one terminal called the communicator can transmit public messages to other terminals before all terminals agree on a secret key. A single-letter characterization of the achievable region is derived in the stationary memoryless case. The new model generalizes some other (old and new) models of key agreement. In particular, key generation with an omniscient helper is the special case where the communicator knows all sources, for which we derive a zero-rate one-shot converse for the secret key per bit of communication.
Information theoretic secret key agreement is impossible without making initial assumptions. One type of initial assumption is correlated random variables that are generated by using a noisy channel that connects the terminals. Terminals use the correlated random variables and communication over a reliable public channel to arrive at a shared secret key. Previous channel models assume that each terminal either controls one input to the channel, or receives one output variable of the channel. In this paper, we propose a new channel model of transceivers where each terminal simultaneously contro…
We consider a model with three terminals and examine the problem of characterizing the largest rates at which two pairs of terminals can simultaneously generate private keys, each of which is effectively concealed from the remaining terminal.
In this paper, we consider the problem of secret key generation with one-way communication through both a rate-limited public channel and a rate-limited secure channels where the public channel is from Alice to Bob and Eve and the secure channel is from Alice to Bob. In this model, we do not pose any constraints on the sources, i.e. Bob is not degraded to or less noisy than Eve. We obtain the optimal secret key rate in this problem, both for the discrete memoryless sources and vector Gaussian sources. The vector Gaussian characterization is derived by suitably applying the enhancement argument…
We study private two-terminal hypothesis testing with simple hypotheses where the privacy goal is to ensure that participating in the testing protocol reveals little additional information about the other user's observation when a user is told what the correct hypothesis is. We show that, in general, meaningful correctness and privacy cannot be achieved if the users do not have access to correlated (but, not common) randomness. We characterize the optimal correctness and privacy error exponents when the users have access to non-trivial correlated randomness (those that permit secure multiparty…
We consider an edge computing scenario where users want to perform a linear computation on local, private data and a network-wide, public matrix. Users offload computations to edge servers located at the edge of the network, but do not want the servers, or any other party with access to the wireless links, to gain any information about their data. We provide a scheme that guarantees information-theoretic user data privacy against an eavesdropper with access to a number of edge servers or their corresponding communication links. The novelty of the proposed scheme lies in the utilization of secr…
We introduce explicit schemes based on the polarization phenomenon for the tasks of one-way secret key agreement from common randomness and private channel coding. For the former task, we show how to use common randomness and insecure one-way communication to obtain a strongly secure key such that the key construction has a complexity essentially linear in the blocklength and the rate at which the key is produced is optimal, i.e., equal to the one-way secret-key rate. For the latter task, we present a private channel coding scheme that achieves the secrecy capacity using the condition of stron…
Fundamental limits of secret-key agreement over reciprocal wireless channels are investigated. We consider a two-way block-fading channel where the channel gains in the forward and reverse links between the legitimate terminals are correlated. The channel gains between the legitimate terminals are not revealed to any terminal, whereas the channel gains of the eavesdropper are revealed to the eavesdropper. We propose a two-phase transmission scheme, that reserves a certain portion of each coherence block for channel estimation, and the remainder of the coherence block for correlated source gene…
We investigate the problem of information theoretically secure communication in a line network with erasure channels and state feedback. We consider a spectrum of cases for the private randomness that intermediate nodes can generate, ranging from having intermediate nodes generate unlimited private randomness, to having intermediate nodes generate no private randomness, and all cases in between. We characterize the secret message capacity when either only one of the channels is eavesdropped or all of the channels are eavesdropped, and we develop polynomial time algorithms that achieve these ca…
We consider perfect secret key generation for a ``pairwise independent network'' model in which every pair of terminals share a random binary string, with the strings shared by distinct terminal pairs being mutually independent. The terminals are then allowed to communicate interactively over a public noiseless channel of unlimited capacity. All the terminals as well as an eavesdropper observe this communication. The objective is to generate a perfect secret key shared by a given set of terminals at the largest rate possible, and concealed from the eavesdropper. First, we show how the notion o…
This work is motivated by recent results of Csiszar and Narayan (IEEE Trans. on Inform. Theory, Dec. 2004), which highlight innate connections between secrecy generation by multiple terminals and multiterminal Slepian-Wolf near-lossless data compression (sans secrecy restrictions). We propose a new approach for constructing secret and private keys based on the long-known Slepian-Wolf code for sources connected by a virtual additive noise channel, due to Wyner (IEEE Trans. on Inform. Theory, Jan. 1974). Explicit procedures for such constructions, and their substantiation, are provided.
We propose an approach for constructing secret and private keys based on the long-known Slepian-Wolf code, due to Wyner, for correlated sources connected by a virtual additive noise channel. Our work is motivated by results of Csiszár and Narayan which highlight innate connections between secrecy generation by multiple terminals that observe correlated source signals and Slepian-Wolf near-lossless data compression. Explicit procedures for such constructions and their substantiation are provided. The performance of low density parity check channel codes in devising a new class of secret keys is…
Harnessing a block-sparse prior to recover signals through underdetermined linear measurements has been extensively shown to allow exact recovery in conditions where classical compressed sensing would provably fail. We exploit this result to propose a novel private communication framework where the secrecy is achieved by transmitting instances of an unidentifiable compressed sensing problem over a public channel. The legitimate receiver can attempt to overcome this ill-posedness by leveraging secret knowledge of a block structure that was used to encode the transmitter's message. We study the …
We consider the problem of multiterminal secret key agreement (SKA) in wiretapped source model where terminals have access to samples of correlated random variables from a publicly known joint probability distribution. The adversary has access to a side information variable, that is correlated with terminals' variables. We focus on a special type of terminal variables in this model, known as Tree-PIN, where the relation between variables of the terminals can be represented by a tree. The study of Tree-PIN source model is of practical importance as it can be realized in wireless network environ…
Csiszar and Narayan[3] defined the notion of secret key capacity for multiple terminals, characterized it as a linear program with Slepian-Wolf constraints of the related source coding problem of communication for omniscience, and upper bounded it by some information divergence expression from the joint to the product distribution of the private observations. This paper proves that the bound is tight for the important case when all users are active, using the polymatroidal structure[6] underlying the source coding problem. When some users are not active, the bound may not be tight. This paper …
Communication complexity refers to the minimum rate of public communication required for generating a maximal-rate secret key (SK) in the multiterminal source model of Csiszar and Narayan. Tyagi recently characterized this communication complexity for a two-terminal system. We extend the ideas in Tyagi's work to derive a lower bound on communication complexity in the general multiterminal setting. In the important special case of the complete graph pairwise independent network (PIN) model, our bound allows us to determine the exact linear communication complexity, i.e., the communication compl…
We study the generation of a secret key of maximum rate by a pair of terminals observing correlated sources and with the means to communicate over a noiseless public com- munication channel. Our main result establishes a structural equivalence between the generation of a maximum rate secret key and the generation of a common randomness that renders the observations of the two terminals conditionally independent. The minimum rate of such common randomness, termed interactive common information, is related to Wyner's notion of common information, and serves to characterize the minimum rate of in…
This paper studies the private key generation of a cooperative pairwise-independent network (PIN) with M+2 terminals (Alice, Bob and M relays), M >= 2. In this PIN, the correlated sources observed by every pair of terminals are independent of those sources observed by any other pair of terminal. All the terminals can communicate with each other over a public channel which is also observed by Eve noiselessly. The objective is to generate a private key between Alice and Bob under the help of the M relays; such a private key needs to be protected not only from Eve but also from individual relays …
We consider the total (upload plus download) communication cost of two-database symmetric private information retrieval (SPIR) through its relationship to conditional disclosure of secrets (CDS). In SPIR, a user wishes to retrieve a message out of $K$ messages from $N$ non-colluding and replicated databases without learning anything beyond the retrieved message, while no individual database learns the retrieved message index. In CDS, two parties each holding an individual input and sharing a common secret wish to disclose this secret to an external party in an efficient manner if and only if t…
We construct a new secret-key assisted polar coding scheme for private classical communication over a quantum or classical wiretap channel. The security of our scheme rests on an entropic uncertainty relation, in addition to the channel polarization effect. Our scheme achieves the symmetric private information rate by synthesizing "amplitude" and "phase" channels from an arbitrary quantum wiretap channel. We find that the secret-key consumption rate of the scheme vanishes for an arbitrary degradable quantum wiretap channel. Furthermore, we provide an additional sufficient condition for when th…
We study the problem of generating a shared secret key between two terminals in a joint source-channel setup -- the sender communicates to the receiver over a discrete memoryless wiretap channel and additionally the terminals have access to correlated discrete memoryless source sequences. We establish lower and upper bounds on the secret-key capacity. These bounds coincide, establishing the capacity, when the underlying channel consists of independent, parallel and reversely degraded wiretap channels. In the lower bound, the equivocation terms of the source and channel components are functiona…
The problem of secret-key based authentication under a privacy constraint on the source sequence is considered. The identifier measurements during authentication are assumed to be controllable via a cost-constrained "action" sequence. Single-letter characterizations of the optimal trade-off among the secret-key rate, storage rate, privacy-leakage rate, and action cost are given for the four problems where noisy or noiseless measurements of the source are enrolled to generate or embed secret keys. The results are relevant for several user-authentication scenarios including physical and biometri…
We study the equivalence between non-perfect secret sharing (NSS) and symmetric private information retrieval (SPIR) with arbitrary response and collusion patterns. NSS and SPIR are defined with an access structure, which corresponds to the authorized/forbidden sets for NSS and the response/collusion patterns for SPIR. We prove the equivalence between NSS and SPIR in the following two senses. 1) Given any SPIR protocol with an access structure, an NSS protocol is constructed with the same access structure and the same rate. 2) Given any linear NSS protocol with an access structure, a linear SP…
Hypergraphical sources are a natural class of sources for secret key generation, within which different subsets of terminals sharing secrets are allowed to discuss publicly in order to agree upon a global secret key. While their secrecy capacity, i.e., the maximum rate of a secret key that can be agreed upon by the entire set of terminals, is well-understood, what remains open is the maximum rate of a secret key that can be generated when there is a restriction on the overall rate of public discussion allowed. In this work, we obtain a family of explicitly computable upper bounds on the number…
The multiterminal secret key agreement problem by public discussion is formulated with an additional source compression step where, prior to the public discussion phase, users independently compress their private sources to filter out strongly correlated components for generating a common secret key. The objective is to maximize the achievable key rate as a function of the joint entropy of the compressed sources. Since the maximum achievable key rate captures the total amount of information mutual to the compressed sources, an optimal compression scheme essentially maximizes the multivariate m…
We consider a group of m+1 trusted nodes that aim to create a shared secret key K over a network in the presence of a passive eavesdropper, Eve. We assume a linear non-coherent network coding broadcast channel (over a finite field F_q) from one of the honest nodes (i.e., Alice) to the rest of them including Eve. All of the trusted nodes can also discuss over a cost-free public channel which is also overheard by Eve. For this setup, we propose upper and lower bounds for the secret key generation capacity assuming that the field size q is very large. For the case of two trusted terminals (m = 1)…
Collins and Popescu realized a powerful analogy between several resources in classical and quantum information theory. The Collins-Popescu analogy states that public classical communication, private classical communication, and secret key interact with one another somewhat similarly to the way that classical communication, quantum communication, and entanglement interact. This paper discusses the information-theoretic treatment of this analogy for the case of noisy quantum channels. We determine a capacity region for a quantum channel interacting with the noiseless resources of public classica…
This paper investigates the problem of secret key generation over a wiretap channel when the terminals observe correlated sources. These sources are independent of the main channel and the users overhear them before the transmission takes place. A novel achievable scheme is proposed, and its optimality is shown under certain less-noisy conditions. This result improves upon the existing literature where the more stringent condition of degradedness is required. Furthermore, numerical evaluation of the proposed scheme and previously reported results for a binary model are presented; a comparison …
In this article, we study the problem of secret key generation in the multiterminal source model, where the terminals have access to correlated Gaussian sources. We assume that the sources form a Markov chain on a tree. We give a nested lattice-based key generation scheme whose computational complexity is polynomial in the number, N , of independent and identically distributed samples observed by each source. We also compute the achievable secret key rate and give a class of examples where our scheme is optimal in the fine quantization limit. However, we also give examples that show that our s…
In this paper, we address the problem of characterizing the instances of the multiterminal source model of Csiszár and Narayan in which communication from all terminals is needed for establishing a secret key of maximum rate. We give an information-theoretic sufficient condition for identifying such instances. We believe that our sufficient condition is in fact an exact characterization, but we are only able to prove this in the case of the three-terminal source model. We also give a relatively simple criterion for determining whether or not our condition holds for a given multiterminal source…
In the classical Secret-Key generation model, Common Randomness is generated by two terminals based on the observation of correlated components of a common source, while keeping it secret from a non-legitimate observer. It is assumed that the statistics of the source are known to all participants. In this work, the Secret-Key generation based on a compound source is studied where the realization of the source statistic is unknown. The protocol should guarantee the security and reliability of the generated Secret-Key, simultaneously for all possible realizations of the compound source. A single…
We construct locally decodable codes (LDCs) to correct insertion-deletion errors in the setting where the sender and receiver share a secret key or where the channel is resource-bounded. Our constructions rely on a so-called "Hamming-to-InsDel" compiler (Ostrovsky and Paskin-Cherniavsky, ITS '15 & Block et al., FSTTCS '20), which compiles any locally decodable Hamming code into a locally decodable code resilient to insertion-deletion (InsDel) errors. While the compilers were designed for the classical coding setting, we show that the compilers still work in a secret key or resource-bounded set…
For the multiterminal secret key agreement problem under a private source model, it is known that the maximum key rate, i.e., the secrecy capacity, can be achieved through communication for omniscience, but the omniscience strategy can be strictly suboptimal in terms of minimizing the public discussion rate. While a single-letter characterization is not known for the minimum discussion rate needed for achieving the secrecy capacity, we derive single-letter lower and upper bounds that yield some simple conditions for omniscience to be discussion-rate optimal. These conditions turn out to be eno…
A subset of a set of terminals that observe correlated signals seek to compute a given function of the signals using public communication. It is required that the value of the function be kept secret from an eavesdropper with access to the communication. We show that the function is securely computable if and only if its entropy is less than the "aided secret key" capacity of an associated secrecy generation model, for which a single-letter characterization is provided.
We study the capacity of secret-key agreement over a wiretap channel with state parameters. The transmitter communicates to the legitimate receiver and the eavesdropper over a discrete memoryless wiretap channel with a memoryless state sequence. The transmitter and the legitimate receiver generate a shared secret key, that remains secret from the eavesdropper. No public discussion channel is available. The state sequence is known noncausally to the transmitter. We derive lower and upper bounds on the secret-key capacity. The lower bound involves constructing a common state reconstruction seque…
A basic two-terminal secret key generation model is considered, where the interactive communication rate between the terminals may be limited, and in particular may not be enough to achieve the maximum key rate. We first prove a multi-letter characterization of the key-communication rate region (where the number of auxiliary random variables depend on the number of rounds of the communication), and then provide an equivalent but simpler characterization in terms of concave envelopes in the case of unlimited number of rounds. Two extreme cases are given special attention. First, in the regime o…
In this paper we consider the problem of generating arbitrary three-party correlations from a combination of public and secret correlations. Two parties -- called Alice and Bob -- share perfectly correlated bits that are secret from a collaborating third party, Charlie. At the same time, all three parties have access to a separate source of correlated bits, and their goal is to convert these two resources into multiple copies of some given tripartite distribution $P_{XYZ}$. We obtain a single-letter characterization of the trade-off between public and private bits that are needed to achieve th…
University of Siegen（锡根大学）；Linköping University（林雪平大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Ruhr-Universität Bochum（波鸿鲁尔大学）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）
The problem of secure source coding with multiple terminals is extended by considering a remote source whose noisy measurements are the correlated random variables used for secure source reconstruction. The main additions to the problem include 1) all terminals noncausally observe a noisy measurement of the remote source; 2) a private key is available to all legitimate terminals; 3) the public communication link between the encoder and decoder is rate-limited; and 4) the secrecy leakage to the eavesdropper is measured with respect to the encoder input, whereas the privacy leakage is measured w…
This work addresses private communication with distributed systems in mind. We consider how to best use secret key resources and communication to transmit signals across a system so that an eavesdropper is least capable to act on the signals. One of the key assumptions is that the private signals are publicly available with a delay---in this case a delay of one. We find that even if the source signal (information source) is memoryless, the design and performance of the optimal system has a strong dependence on which signals are assumed to be available to the eavesdropper with delay. Specifical…
With the rapid growth of quantum technologies, knowing the fundamental characteristics of quantum systems and protocols is essential for their effective implementation. A particular communication setting that has received increased focus is related to quantum key distribution and distributed quantum computation. In this setting, a quantum channel connects a sender to a receiver, and their goal is to distill either a secret key or entanglement, along with the help of arbitrary local operations and classical communication (LOCC). In this work, we establish a general theory of energy-constrained,…
A bipartite quantum interaction corresponds to the most general quantum interaction that can occur between two quantum systems in the presence of a bath. In this work, we determine bounds on the capacities of bipartite interactions for entanglement generation and secret key agreement between two quantum systems. Our upper bound on the entanglement generation capacity of a bipartite quantum interaction is given by a quantity called the bidirectional max-Rains information. Our upper bound on the secret-key-agreement capacity of a bipartite quantum interaction is given by a related quantity calle…
A novel framework for sharing common randomness and generating secret keys in wireless networks is considered. In particular, a network of users equipped with pulse oscillators (POs) and coupling mechanisms in between is considered. Such mechanisms exist in synchronized biological and natural systems, and have been exploited to provide synchronization in distributed networks. We show that naturally-existing initial random phase differences between the POs in the network can be utilized to provide almost identical common randomness to the users. This randomness is extracted from the synchroniza…
Physical-layer key generation (PKG) based on channel reciprocity has recently emerged as a new technique to establish secret keys between devices. Most works focus on pairwise communication scenarios with single or small-scale antennas. However, the fifth generation (5G) wireless communications employ massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) to support multiple users simultaneously, bringing serious overhead of reciprocal channel acquisition. This paper presents a multi-user secret key generation in massive MIMO wireless networks. We provide a beam domain channel model, in which different…
A source model for secret key generation between terminals is considered. Two users, namely users 1 and 2, at one side communicate with another user, namely user 3, at the other side via a public channel where three users can observe i.i.d. outputs of correlated sources. Each of users 1 and 2 intends to share a secret key with user 3 where user 1 acts as a wiretapper for user 2 and vice versa. In this model, two situations are considered: communication from users 1 and 2 to user 3 (the forward key strategy) and from user 3 to users 1 and 2 (the backward key strategy). In both situations, the g…
For a multi-source multi-terminal noiseless network, the key-dissemination problem involves the task of multicasting a secret key K from the network sources to its terminals. As in secure multicast network-coding, in the key-dissemination problem the source nodes have access to independent randomness and, as the network is noiseless, the resulting key K is a function of the sources' information. However, different from traditional forms of multicast, in key-dissemination the key K need not consist of source messages, but rather may be any function of the information generated at the sources, a…
