Security

Degraded discrete memoryless wiretap channel

A sender communicates reliably to a legitimate receiver while keeping the message secret from a degraded eavesdropper.

Solved Lean: not started

Channel specification

Input

\(X\in\mathcal X\)

Output

Legitimate output \(Y\in\mathcal Y\) and eavesdropper output \(Z\in\mathcal Z\).

Law

The channel is memoryless and physically degraded: \(X\to Y\to Z\).

Assumptions

  • Reliability is required at the legitimate receiver.
  • Information leakage to the eavesdropper vanishes under the chosen secrecy criterion.

Secrecy capacity

secret bits per channel use characterization
\[C_s=\max_{P_X}\bigl[I(X;Y)-I(X;Z)\bigr]\]

Conditions. The channel is physically degraded.

Symbol
\(C_s\)
Error criterion
Reliable communication with asymptotically vanishing leakage.

Known bounds and characterizations

TypeClaimMethodSource
lower \(C_s\ge\max_{P_X}[I(X;Y)-I(X;Z)]\) Stochastic encoding and random binning. 1975 [1]
upper \(C_s\le\max_{P_X}[I(X;Y)-I(X;Z)]\) Fano's inequality, secrecy, and degradedness. 1975 [1]

Bound timeline

  1. 1975

    Wyner introduced the wiretap channel and proved the degraded secrecy-capacity formula.

    Reference

Formalization status

Lean: not started

Not started

Secrecy criteria and mutual-information converses are not yet present in the Lean core.

  1. Definitions
  2. Statement
  3. Partial proof
  4. Complete proof

No Lean file is linked yet. A contribution should begin by reusing the shared definitions under lean/CapacityAtlas.

Primary sources

  1. Aaron D. Wyner (1975). The wire-tap channel. Bell System Technical Journal. doi:10.1002/j.1538-7305.1975.tb02040.x
  2. Thomas M. Cover and Joy A. Thomas (2006). Elements of Information Theory. Wiley, second edition. doi:10.1002/047174882X
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