Capacity results and super-activation for wiretap channels with active wiretappers

Abstract

The classical wiretap channel models secure communication in the presence of a nonlegitimate wiretapper who has to be kept ignorant. Traditionally, the wiretapper is passive in the sense that he only tries to eavesdrop the communication using his received channel output. In this paper, more powerful active wiretappers are studied. In addition to eavesdropping, these wiretappers are able to influence the communication conditions of all users by controlling the corresponding channel states. Since legitimate transmitters and receivers do not know the actual channel realization or the wiretapper's strategy of influencing the channel states, they are confronted with arbitrarily varying channel (AVC) conditions. The corresponding secure communication scenario is, therefore, given by the arbitrarily varying wiretap channel (AVWC). In the context of AVCs, common randomness (CR) has been shown to be an important resource for establishing reliable communication, in particular, if the AVC is symmetrizable. But availability of CR also affects the strategy space of an active wiretapper as he may or may not exploit the common randomness for selecting the channel states. Several secrecy capacity results are derived for the AVWC. In particular, the CR-assisted secrecy capacity of the AVWC with an active wiretapper exploiting CR is established and analyzed in detail. Finally, it is demonstrated for active wiretappers how two orthogonal AVWCs, each useless for transmission of secure messages, can be super-activated to a useful channel allowing for secure communication at nonzero secrecy rates. To the best of our knowledge, this is not possible for passive wiretappers and, further, provides the first example of such super-activation, which has been expected to appear only in the area of quantum communication. Such knowledge is particularly important as it provides valuable insights for the design and the medium access control of future wireless communication systems.