Secure Groupcast: Extra-Entropic Structure and Linear Feasibility

Abstract: In the secure groupcast problem, a transmitter wants to securely groupcast a message with the maximum rate to the first $N$ of $K$ receivers by broadcasting with the minimum bandwidth, where the $K$ receivers are each equipped with a key variable from a known joint distribution. Examples are provided to prove that different instances of secure groupcast that have the same entropic structure, i.e., the same entropy for all subsets of the key variables, can have different maximum groupcast rates and different minimum broadcast bandwidth. Thus, extra-entropic structure matters for secure groupcast. Next, the maximum groupcast rate is explored when the key variables are generic linear combinations of a basis set of independent key symbols, i.e., the keys lie in generic subspaces. The maximum groupcast rate is characterized when the dimension of each key subspace is either small or large, i.e., the extreme regimes. For the intermediate regime, various interference alignment schemes originated from wireless interference networks, such as eigenvector based and asymptotic schemes, are shown to be useful.