Secure Source Coding With Action-Dependent Side Information

Abstract

We consider the problems of secure lossy source coding with side information in the presence of a passive eavesdropper who has access to the source description. The encoder wishes to compress the source sequence in order to satisfy a distortion criterion at the decoder, while revealing only limited knowledge about the source to the eavesdropper. The side information available to the encoder, the legitimate decoder, or the eavesdropper can be influenced by a cost-constrained action sequence. Three different settings are studied. In the first two settings, we are interested in understanding the influence of the action sequence on the rate-distortion-leakage tradeoff where the action is taken either by the decoder or by the encoder to influence side information at the decoder and eavesdropper. Next, we consider a setting where common action-dependent side information is available securely to both encoder and decoder, and thus can be used for secret key generation. We characterize the optimal rate-distortion-cost-leakage region or the corresponding inner bounds for a discrete memoryless source for above settings. The results are useful in characterizing fundamental limits for example in secure sensor networking and future cyber physical systems.