On Caching with Finite Blocklength Coding for Secrecy over the Binary Erasure Wiretap Channel

Abstract

In this paper, we show that caching can aid in achieving secure communications by considering a wiretap scenario where the transmitter and legitimate receiver share access to a secure cache, and an eavesdropper is able to tap transmissions over a binary erasure wiretap channel during the delivery phase of a caching protocol. The scenario under consideration gives rise to a new channel model for wiretap coding that allows the transmitter to effectively choose a subset of bits to erase at the eavesdropper by caching the bits ahead of time. The eavesdropper observes the remainder of the coded bits through the wiretap channel for the general case. In the wiretap type-II scenario, the eavesdropper is able to choose a set of revealed bits only from the subset of bits not cached. We present a coding approach that allows efficient use of the cache to realize a caching gain in the network, and show how to use the cache to optimize the information theoretic security in the choice of a finite blocklength code and the choice of the cached bit set. To our knowledge, this is the first work on explicit algorithms for secrecy coding in any type of caching network.