In this work we consider the communication of information in the presence of a causal adversarial jammer. In the setting under study, a sender wishes to communicate a message to a receiver by transmitting a codeword x=(x_1,...,x_n) bit-by-bit over a communication channel. The adversarial jammer can view the transmitted bits x_i one at a time, and can change up to a p-fraction of them. However, the decisions of the jammer must be made in an online or causal manner. Namely, for each bit x_i the jammer's decision on whether to corrupt it or not (and on how to change it) must depend only on x_j for j <= i. This is in contrast to the "classical" adversarial jammer which may base its decisions on its complete knowledge of x. We present a non-trivial upper bound on the amount of information that can be communicated. We show that the achievable rate can be asymptotically no greater than min 1-H(p),(1-4p)^+ . Here H(.) is the binary entropy function, and (1-4p)^+ equals 1-4p for p < 0.25, and 0 otherwise.
We note that under a very weak notion of capacity in which one only requires the success probability to be bounded away from zero (instead of approaching @math ), the capacity of the omniscient channel, and thus the binary causal-adversary channel, approaches @math . This follows by the fact that for @math sufficiently large and @math there exists @math codes which are @math list decodable with @math @cite_9 . Communicating using an @math list decodable code allows Bob to decode a list of size @math of messages which includes the message transmitted by Alice. Choosing a message uniformly at random from his list, Bob decodes correctly with probability at least @math .
@cite_9
2211831180 2043868537 2537174396 2963279554
Suppose that Alice wishes to send messages to Bob through a communication channel C1, but her transmissions also reach an eavesdropper Eve through another channel C2. This is the wiretap channel model introduced by Wyner in 1975. The goal is to design a coding scheme that makes it possible for Alice to communicate both reliably and securely. Reliability is measured in terms of Bob's probability of error in recovering the message, while security is measured in terms of the mutual information between the message and Eve's observations. Wyner showed that the situation is characterized by a single constant Cs, called the secrecy capacity, which has the following meaning: for all e >; 0, there exist coding schemes of rate R ≥ Cs-e that asymptotically achieve the reliability and security objectives. However, his proof of this result is based upon a random-coding argument. To date, despite consider able research effort, the only case where we know how to construct coding schemes that achieve secrecy capacity is when Eve's channel C2 is an erasure channel, or a combinatorial variation thereof. Polar codes were recently invented by Arikan; they approach the capacity of symmetric binary-input discrete memoryless channels with low encoding and decoding complexity. In this paper, we use polar codes to construct a coding scheme that achieves the secrecy capacity for a wide range of wiretap channels. Our construction works for any instantiation of the wiretap channel model, as long as both C1 and C2 are symmetric and binary-input, and C2 is degraded with respect to C1. Moreover, we show how to modify our construction in order to provide strong security, in the sense defined by Maurer, while still operating at a rate that approaches the secrecy capacity. In this case, we cannot guarantee that the reliability condition will also be satisfied unless the main channel C1 is noiseless, although we believe it can be always satisfied in practice. Consider two parties Alice and Bob, who hold private inputs x and y, and wish to compute a function f(x, y) privately in the information theoretic sense; that is, each party should learn nothing beyond f(x, y). However, the communication channel available to them is noisy. This means that the channel can introduce errors in the transmission between the two parties. Moreover, the channel is adversarial in the sense that it knows the protocol that Alice and Bob are running, and maliciously introduces errors to disrupt the communication, subject to some bound on the total number of errors. A fundamental question in this setting is to design a protocol that remains private in the presence of large number of errors. If Alice and Bob are only interested in computing f(x, y) correctly, and not privately, then quite robust protocols are known that can tolerate a constant fraction of errors. However, none of these solutions is applicable in the setting of privacy, as they inherently leak information about the parties' inputs. This leads to the question whether we can simultaneously achieve privacy and error-resilience against a constant fraction of errors. We show that privacy and error-resilience are contradictory goals. In particular, we show that for every constant c > 0, there exists a function f which is privately computable in the error-less setting, but for which no private and correct protocol is resilient against a c-fraction of errors. The same impossibility holds also for sub-constant noise rate, e.g., when c is exponentially small (as a function of the input size). This paper considers recovering @math -dimensional vectors @math , and @math from their circular convolutions @math . The vector @math is assumed to be @math -sparse in a known basis that is spread out in the Fourier domain, and each input @math is a member of a known @math -dimensional random subspace. We prove that whenever @math , the problem can be solved effectively by using only the nuclear-norm minimization as the convex relaxation, as long as the inputs are sufficiently diverse and obey @math . By “diverse inputs,” we mean that the @math ’s belong to different, generic subspaces. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first theoretical result on blind deconvolution where the subspace to which @math belongs is not fixed but needs to be determined. We discuss the result in the context of multipath channel estimation in wireless communications. Both the fading coefficients and the delays in the channel impulse response @math are unknown. The encoder codes the @math -dimensional message vectors randomly and then transmits coded messages @math ’s over a fixed channel one after the other. The decoder then discovers all of the messages and the channel response when the number of samples taken for each received message are roughly greater than @math , and the number of messages is roughly at least @math . We consider coding schemes for computationally bounded channels, which can introduce an arbitrary set of errors as long as (a) the fraction of errors is bounded with high probability by a parameter p and (b) the process that adds the errors can be described by a sufficiently “simple” circuit. Codes for such channel models are attractive since, like codes for standard adversarial errors, they can handle channels whose true behavior is unknown or varying over time. For two classes of channels, we provide explicit, efficiently encodable decodable codes of optimal rate where only inefficiently decodable codes were previously known. In each case, we provide one encoder decoder that works for every channel in the class. The encoders are randomized, and probabilities are taken over the (local, unknown to the decoder) coins of the encoder and those of the channel. Unique decoding for additive errors: We give the first construction of a polynomial-time encodable decodable code for additive (a.k.a. oblivious) channels that achieve the Shannon capacity 1 − H(p). These are channels that add an arbitrary error vector e ∈ 0, 1 N of weight at most pN to the transmitted word; the vector e can depend on the code but not on the randomness of the encoder or the particular transmitted word. Such channels capture binary symmetric errors and burst errors as special cases. List decoding for polynomial-time channels: For every constant c > 0, we construct codes with optimal rate (arbitrarily close to 1 − H(p)) that efficiently recover a short list containing the correct message with high probability for channels describable by circuits of size at most Nc. Our construction is not fully explicit but rather Monte Carlo (we give an algorithm that, with high probability, produces an encoder decoder pair that works for all time Nc channels). We are not aware of any channel models considered in the information theory literature other than purely adversarial channels, which require more than linear-size circuits to implement. We justify the relaxation to list decoding with an impossibility result showing that, in a large range of parameters (p > 1 4), codes that are uniquely decodable for a modest class of channels (online, memoryless, nonuniform channels) cannot have positive rate.