Pairwise Independent Network Model Research Articles

Upper Bounds via Lamination on the Constrained Secrecy Capacity of Hypergraphical Sources

Hypergraphical sources are a natural class of sources for secret key generation, within which different subsets of terminals sharing secrets are allowed to discuss publicly in order to agree upon a global secret key. While their secrecy capacity, i.e., the maximum rate of a secret key that can be agreed upon by the entire set of terminals, is well-understood, what remains open is the maximum rate of a secret key that can be generated when there is a restriction on the overall rate of public discussion allowed. In this paper, we obtain a family of explicitly computable upper bounds on the number of bits of secret key that can be generated per bit of public discussion. These upper bounds are derived using a lamination technique based on the submodularity of the entropy function. In particular, a specific instance of these upper bounds, called the edge-partition bound, is shown to be tight for the pairwise independent network model, a special case of the hypergraphical source when the hypergraph is a graph. The secret key generation scheme achieving this upper bound is the tree-packing protocol of Nitinawarat et al. , thereby resolving in the affirmative the discussion rate optimality of the tree-packing protocol.

Compressed Secret Key Agreement:Maximizing Multivariate Mutual Information per Bit

The multiterminal secret key agreement problem by public discussion is formulated with an additional source compression step where, prior to the public discussion phase, users independently compress their private sources to filter out strongly correlated components in order to generate a common secret key. The objective is to maximize the achievable key rate as a function of the joint entropy of the compressed sources. Since the maximum achievable key rate captures the total amount of information mutual to the compressed sources, an optimal compression scheme essentially maximizes the multivariate mutual information per bit of randomness of the private sources, and can therefore be viewed more generally as a dimension reduction technique. Single-letter lower and upper bounds on the maximum achievable key rate are derived for the general source model, and an explicit polynomial-time computable formula is obtained for the pairwise independent network model. In particular, the converse results and the upper bounds are obtained from those of the related secret key agreement problem with rate-limited discussion. A precise duality is shown for the two-user case with one-way discussion, and such duality is extended to obtain the desired converse results in the multi-user case. In addition to posing new challenges in information processing and dimension reduction, the compressed secret key agreement problem helps shed new light on resolving the difficult problem of secret key agreement with rate-limited discussion by offering a more structured achieving scheme and some simpler conjectures to prove.

On the Private Key Capacity of the <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$M$ </tex-math> </inline-formula>-Relay Pairwise Independent Network

We study the problem of private key generation in a cooperative pairwise independent network (PIN), with $M+2$ terminals (Alice, Bob, and $M$ relays), $M\geq 2$ . In the PIN, the correlated source observed by every pair of terminals is independent of the sources observed by any other pairs of terminals. Moreover, all terminals can communicate with each other over a public channel, which is also observed by Eve, noiselessly. The objective is to generate a private key between Alice and Bob with the help of the $M$ relays; such a private key needs to be protected not only from Eve but also from all relays. A single-letter expression for the private key capacity of this PIN model is obtained, where the achievability part is established by proposing a random binning (RB)-based key generation algorithm, and the converse part is established by deriving upper bounds of $M$ enhanced source models. Next, we consider a cooperative wireless network and use the estimates of fading channels to generate private keys. It has been shown that the proposed RB key generation algorithm can achieve a multiplexing gain of $M-1$ , which is an improvement compared with the existing XOR algorithm, whose achievable multiplexing gain is $\lfloor M /2\rfloor $ .

Simultaneously Generating Secret and Private Keys in a Cooperative Pairwise-Independent Network

This paper studies the problem of simultaneously generating a secret key (SK) and a private key (PK) between Alice and Bob, in a cooperative pairwise-independent network (PIN) with two relays. In the PIN, the pairwise source observed by every pair of terminals is independent of those sources observed by any other pairs. The SK needs to be protected from Eve, while the PK needs to be protected not only from Eve but also from the two relays. Two cooperative SK–PK generation algorithms are proposed: both of them first generate common randomness, based on the well-established pairwise key generation technique and the application of the one-time pad; but then, the two algorithms utilize the XOR operation and a specific random-binning-based SK–PK codebook to generate the expected keys, respectively. The achievable SK–PK rate regions of both the two proposed algorithms are analyzed. Of particular interest is the second algorithm with random-bing based codebook, whose achievable key rate region is demonstrated to be exactly the same as the derived outer bound, a crucial step for establishing the key capacity of this PIN model. Finally, the two proposed SK–PK generation algorithms are extended to a cooperative wireless network, where the correlated source observations are obtained from estimating wireless channels during a training phase.

Key Generation Algorithms for Pairwise Independent Networks Based on Graphical Models

We consider two secret key generation problems under a pairwise independent network model, and propose low complexity key generation schemes in a framework that connects our problems to network flow problems in graphs. Our schemes have two components: 1) local key generation and 2) global key propagation. In the local key generation, we use point-to-point source coding with side information to establish pairwise keys, from which we construct a graph with the capacity of each edge being the key rate of the corresponding point-to-point local key. In the global key propagation, depending on the particular problem, secret keys are delivered to users in the network using various network flow algorithms. In particular, in the first problem in which one is required to generate a group key for a group of users in the network, we propose a network coding-based global key propagation approach. This approach has a low complexity and has a better performance than the existing approach. In the second problem, in which one is required to generate multiple keys simultaneously for different pairs of users, we propose a multicommodity flow-based global key propagation approach. We show that the proposed approach is optimal for the case of generating two keys. For the general case of generating more than two keys, we show that the sum rate of the proposed scheme is larger than an upper bound characterized in this paper divided by a constant.

Secret key generation for a pairwise independent network model

We consider secret key generation for a pairwise independent network model in which every pair of terminals observes correlated sources that are independent of sources observed by all other pairs...