Wiretap channel with rate-limited feedback

Abstract—This paper studies the problem of secure communi-cation over a degraded wiretap channel p(y, z|x) = p(y|x)p(z|y) with secure feedback link of rate Rf, where X is the channel input, and Y and Z are channel outputs observed by the legitimate receiver and the wiretapper respectively. The secrecy capacity is characterized as Cs(Rf) = max p(x) min{I(X;Y), I(X;Y |Z) + Rf}. A capacity-achieving coding scheme is presented, in which the receiver securely feeds back fresh randomness with rate Rf, independent of the received channel output. The transmitter then uses the shared randomness as a secret key on top of Wyner’s coding scheme for wiretap channel without feedback. Hence, when the receiver has a means of interacting with the transmitter, he should allocate all resources to convey a new key rather than sending back the channel output. For the converse, a recursive argument is used to obtain the single-letter characterization. I