We analyze the exact exponential decay rate of the expected amount of information leaked to the wiretapper in Wyner’s wiretap channel setting using wiretap channel codes constructed from both i.i.d. and constant-composition random codes. Our analysis for those sampled from i.i.d. random coding ensemble shows that the previously known achievable secrecy exponent using this ensemble is indeed the exact exponent for an average code in the ensemble. Furthermore, our analysis on wiretap channel codes constructed from the ensemble of constant-composition random codes leads to an exponent which, in addition to being the exact exponent for an average code, is larger than the achievable secrecy exponent that has been established so far in the literature for this ensemble (which in turn was known to be smaller than that achievable by wiretap channel codes sampled from i.i.d. random coding ensemble). We show examples where the exact secrecy exponent for the wiretap channel codes constructed from random constant-composition codes is larger than that of those constructed from i.i.d. random codes and examples where the exact secrecy exponent for the wiretap channel codes constructed from i.i.d. random codes is larger than that of those constructed from constant-composition random codes. We, hence, conclude that, unlike the error correction problem, there is no general ordering between the two random coding ensembles in terms of their secrecy exponent.
 The minimum rate needed to accurately approximate a product distribution based on an unnormalized informational divergence is shown to be a mutual information. This result subsumes results of Wyner on common information and Han-Verdu on resolvability. The result also extends to cases where the source distribution is unknown but the entropy is known. We consider the secret key generation problem when sources are randomly excited by the sender and there is a noiseless public discussion channel. Our setting is thus similar to recent works on channels with action-dependent states where the channel state may be influenced by some of the parties involved. We derive single-letter expressions for the secret key capacity through a type of source emulation analysis. We also derive lower bounds on the achievable reliability and secrecy exponents, i.e., the exponential rates of decay of the probability of decoding error and of the information leakage. These exponents allow us to determine a set of strongly-achievable secret key rates. For degraded eavesdroppers the maximum strongly-achievable rate equals the secret key capacity; our exponents can also be specialized to previously known results. In deriving our strong achievability results we introduce a coding scheme that combines wiretap coding (to excite the channel) and key extraction (to distill keys from residual randomness). The secret key capacity is naturally seen to be a combination of both source- and channel-type randomness. Through examples we illustrate a fundamental interplay between the portion of the secret key rate due to each type of randomness. We also illustrate inherent tradeoffs between the achievable reliability and secrecy exponents. Our new scheme also naturally accommodates rate limits on the public discussion. We show that under rate constraints we are able to achieve larger rates than those that can be attained through a pure source emulation strategy.