Coding Schemes for Achieving Strong Secrecy at Negligible Cost

Abstract: We study the problem of achieving strong secrecy over wiretap channels at negligible cost, in the sense of maintaining the overall communication rate of the same channel without secrecy constraints. Specifically, we propose and analyze two source-channel coding architectures, in which secrecy is achieved by multiplexing public and confidential messages. In both cases, our main contribution is to show that secrecy can be achieved without compromising communication rate and by requiring only randomness of asymptotically vanishing rate. Our first source-channel coding architecture relies on a modified wiretap channel code, in which randomization is performed using the output of a source code. In contrast, our second architecture relies on a standard wiretap code combined with a modified source code termed uniform compression code, in which a small shared secret seed is used to enhance the uniformity of the source code output. We carry out a detailed analysis of uniform compression codes and characterize the optimal size of the shared seed.