Exploiting common randomness: A resource for network secrecy

László Czap, Vinod M. Prabhakaran, Suhas N. Diggavi, Christina Fragouli

Abstract: We investigate the problem of secure communication in a simple network with three communicating parties, two distributed sources who communicate over orthogonal channels to one destination node. The cooperation between the sources is restricted to a rate limited common random source they both observe. The communication channels are erasure channels with strictly causal channel state information of the destination available publicly. A passive adversary is present in the system eavesdropping on any one of the channels. We design a linear scheme that ensures secrecy against the eavesdropper. By deriving an outer bound for the problem we prove that the scheme is optimal in certain special cases.