Polar coding for secure transmission and key agreement

Abstract

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 Arikan. It is shown that polar codes achieve nontrivial 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 capacity. Next, fading erasure wiretap channels are considered and a secret key agreement scheme is proposed, which requires only the statistical knowledge of the eavesdropper channel state information (CSI). The enabling factor is the creation of advantage over Eve, by blindly using the proposed scheme over each fading block, which is then exploited with privacy amplification techniques to generate secret keys.