Compound Wiretap Channels

This paper considers the compound wiretap channel, which generalizes Wyner’s wiretap model to allow the channels to the (legitimate) receiver and to the eavesdropper to take a number of possible states. No matter which states occur, the transmitter guarantees that the receiver decodes its message and that the eavesdropper is kept in full ignorance about the message. The compound wiretap channel can also be viewed as a multicast channel with multiple eavesdroppers, in which the transmitter sends information to all receivers and keeps the information secret from all eavesdroppers. For the discrete memoryless channel, lower and upper bounds on the secrecy capacity are derived. The secrecy capacity is established for the degraded channel and the semideterministic channel with one receiver. The parallel Gaussian channel is further studied. The secrecy capacity and the secrecy degree of freedom (s.d.o. f .) are derived for the degraded case with one receiver. Schemes to achieve the s.d.o. f . for the case with two receivers and two eavesdroppers are constructed to demonstrate the necessity of a prefix channel in encoder design. Finally, the multi-antenna (i.e., MIMO) compound wiretap channel is studied. The secrecy capacity is established for the degraded case and an achievable s.d.o. f . is given for the general case.