Cooperative Resolvability and Secrecy in the Cribbing Multiple-Access Channel

Abstract: We study channel resolvability for the discrete memoryless multiple-access channel with cribbing, i.e., the characterization of the amount of randomness required at the inputs to approximately produce a chosen i.i.d. output distribution according to KL divergence. We analyze resolvability rates when one encoder cribs (i) the input of the other encoder; or the output of the other encoder, (ii) non-causally, (iii) causally, or (iv) strictly-causally. For scenarios (i)-(iii), we exactly characterize the channel resolvability region. For (iv), we provide inner and outer bounds for the channel resolvability region; the crux of our achievability result is to handle the strict causality constraint with a block-Markov coding scheme in which dependencies across blocks are suitably hidden. Finally, we leverage the channel resolvability results to derive achievable secrecy rate regions for each of the cribbing scenarios under strong secrecy constraints.