Achieving Secrecy Capacity of the Wiretap Channel and Broadcast Channel with a Confidential Component

Abstract: The wiretap channel model of Wyner is one of the first communication models with both reliability and security constraints. Capacity-achieving schemes for various models of the wiretap channel have received considerable attention in recent literature. In this paper, we show that capacity of the general (not necessarily degraded or symmetric) wiretap channel under a "strong secrecy constraint" can be achieved using a transmission scheme based on polar codes. We also extend our construction to the case of broadcast channels with confidential messages defined by Csisz{\'a}r and K{\"orner}, achieving the entire capacity region of this communication model.