The Wiretap Channel with Generalized Feedback: Secure Communication and Key Generation

Abstract: It is a well-known fact that feedback does not increase the capacity of point-to-point memoryless channels, however, its effect in secure communications is not fully understood yet. In this work, an achievable scheme for the wiretap channel with generalized feedback is presented. This scheme, which uses the feedback signal to generate a shared secret key between the legitimate users, encrypts the message to be sent at the bit level. New capacity results for a class of channels are provided, as well as some new insights into the secret key agreement problem. Moreover, this scheme recovers previously reported rate regions from the literature, and thus it can be seen as a generalization that unifies several results in the field.