Soft Covering with High Probability

Abstract: Wyner's soft-covering lemma is the central analysis step for achievability proofs of information theoretic security, resolvability, and channel synthesis. It can also be used for simple achievability proofs in lossy source coding. This work sharpens the claim of soft-covering by moving away from an expected value analysis. Instead, a random codebook is shown to achieve the soft-covering phenomenon with high probability. The probability of failure is super-exponentially small in the block-length, enabling many applications through the union bound. This work gives bounds for both the exponential decay rate of total variation and the second-order codebook rate for soft covering.