Plausible deniability over broadcast channels

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce the notion of Plausible Deniability in an information theoretic framework. We consider a scenario where an entity that eavesdrops through a broadcast channel summons one of the parties in a communication protocol to reveal their message (or signal vector). It is desirable that the summoned party have enough freedom to produce a fake output that is likely plausible given the eavesdropper's observation. We examine three variants of this problem - Message Deniability, Transmitter Deniability, and Receiver Deniability. In the first setting, the message sender is summoned to produce the sent message. Similarly, in the second and third settings, the transmitter and the receiver are required to produce the transmitted codeword, and the received vector respectively. For each of these settings, we examine the maximum communication rate that allows a given minimum rate of plausible fake outputs. For the Message and Transmitter Deniability problems, we fully characterise the capacity region for general broadcast channels, while for the Receiver Deniability problem, we give an achievable rate region for stochastically degraded broadcast channels.