Guaranteed Private Communication with Secret Block Structure

Abstract: A novel private communication framework is proposed where privacy is induced by transmitting over a channel instances of linear inverse problems that are identifiable to the legitimate receiver but unidentifiable to an eavesdropper. The gap in identifiability is created in the framework by leveraging secret knowledge between the transmitter and the legitimate receiver. Specifically, the case where the legitimate receiver harnesses a secret block structure to decode a transmitted block-sparse message from underdetermined linear measurements in conditions where classical compressed sensing would provably fail is examined. The applicability of the proposed scheme to practical multiple-access wireless communication systems is discussed. The protocol's privacy is studied under a single transmission, and under multiple transmissions without refreshing the secret block structure. It is shown that, under a specific scaling of the channel dimensions and transmission parameters, the eavesdropper can attempt to overhear the block structure from the fourth-order moments of the channel output. Computation of a statistical lower bound suggests that the proposed fourth-order moment secret block estimation strategy is near optimal. The performance of a spectral clustering algorithm is studied to that end, defining scaling laws on the lifespan of the secret key before the communication is compromised. Finally, numerical experiments corroborating the theoretical findings are conducted.