The Wire-Tap Channel

Abstract

We consider the situation in which digital data is to be reliably transmitted over a discrete, memoryless channel (dmc) that is subjected to a wire-tap at the receiver. We assume that the wire-tapper views the channel output via a second dmc). Encoding by the transmitter and decoding by the receiver are permitted. However, the code books used in these operations are assumed to be known by the wire-tapper. The designer attempts to build the encoder-decoder in such a way as to maximize the transmission rate R, and the equivocation d of the data as seen by the wire-tapper. In this paper, we find the trade-off curve between R and d, assuming essentially perfect (“error-free”) transmission. In particular, if d is equal to Hs, the entropy of the data source, then we consider that the transmission is accomplished in perfect secrecy. Our results imply that there exists a C <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">s</inf> > 0, such that reliable transmission at rates up to C <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">s</inf> is possible in approximately perfect secrecy.