No Arabic abstract
In this work we consider the communication of information in the presence of an online 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 symbol-by-symbol over a communication channel. The adversarial jammer can view the transmitted symbols 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. More generally, for a delay parameter 0<d<1, we study the scenario in which the jammers decision on the corruption of x_i must depend solely on x_j for j < i - dn. In this work, we initiate the study of codes for online adversaries, and present a tight characterization of the amount of information one can transmit in both the 0-delay and, more generally, the d-delay online setting. We prove tight results for both additive and overwrite jammers when the transmitted symbols are assumed to be over a sufficiently large field F. Finally, we extend our results to a jam-or-listen online model, where the online adversary can either jam a symbol or eavesdrop on it. We again provide a tight characterization of the achievable rate for several variants of this model. The rate-regions we prove for each model are informational-theoretic in nature and hold for computationally unbounded adversaries. The rate regions are characterized by simple piecewise linear functions of p and d. The codes we construct to attain the optimal rate for each scenario are computationally efficient.
Network coding is studied when an adversary controls a subset of nodes in the network of limited quantity but unknown location. This problem is shown to be more difficult than when the adversary controls a given number of edges in the network, in that linear codes are insufficient. To solve the node problem, the class of Polytope Codes is introduced. Polytope Codes are constant composition codes operating over bounded polytopes in integer vector fields. The polytope structure creates additional complexity, but it induces properties on marginal distributions of code vectors so that validities of codewords can be checked by internal nodes of the network. It is shown that Polytope Codes achieve a cut-set bound for a class of planar networks. It is also shown that this cut-set bound is not always tight, and a tighter bound is given for an example network.
We study privacy-utility trade-offs where users share privacy-correlated useful information with a service provider to obtain some utility. The service provider is adversarial in the sense that it can infer the users private information based on the shared useful information. To minimize the privacy leakage while maintaining a desired level of utility, the users carefully perturb the useful information via a probabilistic privacy mapping before sharing it. We focus on the setting in which the adversary attempting an inference attack on the users privacy has potentially biased information about the statistical correlation between the private and useful variables. This information asymmetry between the users and the limited adversary leads to better privacy guarantees than the case of the omniscient adversary under the same utility requirement. We first identify assumptions on the adversarys information so that the inference costs are well-defined and finite. Then, we characterize the impact of the information asymmetry and show that it increases the inference costs for the adversary. We further formulate the design of the privacy mapping against a limited adversary using a difference of convex functions program and solve it via the concave-convex procedure. When the adversarys information is not precisely available, we adopt a Bayesian view and represent the adversarys information by a probability distribution. In this case, the expected cost for the adversary does not admit a closed-form expression, and we establish and maximize a lower bound of the expected cost. We provide a numerical example regarding a census data set to illustrate the theoretical results.
We consider the problem of communication over a channel with a causal jamming adversary subject to quadratic constraints. A sender Alice wishes to communicate a message to a receiver Bob by transmitting a real-valued length-$n$ codeword $mathbf{x}=x_1,...,x_n$ through a communication channel. Alice and Bob do not share common randomness. Knowing Alices encoding strategy, an adversarial jammer James chooses a real-valued length-n noise sequence $mathbf{s}=s_1,..,s_n$ in a causal manner, i.e., each $s_t (1<=t<=n)$ can only depend on $x_1,...,x_t$. Bob receives $mathbf{y}$, the sum of Alices transmission $mathbf{x}$ and James jamming vector $mathbf{s}$, and is required to reliably estimate Alices message from this sum. In addition, Alice and Jamess transmission powers are restricted by quadratic constraints $P>0$ and $N>0$. In this work, we characterize the channel capacity for such a channel as the limit superior of the optimal values of a series of optimizations. Upper and lower bounds on the optimal values are provided both analytically and numerically. Interestingly, unlike many communication problems, in this causal setting Alices optimal codebook may not have a uniform power allocation - for certain SNR, a codebook with a two-level uniform power allocation results in a strictly higher rate than a codebook with a uniform power allocation would.
The list-decodable code has been an active topic in theoretical computer science since the seminal papers of M. Sudan and V. Guruswami in 1997-1998. There are general result about the Johnson radius and the list-decoding capacity theorem for random codes. However few results about general constraints on rates, list-decodable radius and list sizes for list-decodable codes have been obtained. In this paper we show that rates, list-decodable radius and list sizes are closely related to the classical topic of covering codes. We prove new simple but strong upper bounds for list-decodable codes based on various covering codes. Then any good upper bound on the covering radius imply a good upper bound on the size of list-decodable codes. Hence the list-decodablity of codes is a strong constraint from the view of covering codes. Our covering code upper bounds for $(d,1)$ list decodable codes give highly non-trivial upper bounds on the sizes of codes with the given minimum Hamming distances. Our results give exponential improvements on the recent generalized Singleton upper bound of Shangguan and Tamo in STOC 2020, when the code lengths are very large. The asymptotic forms of covering code bounds can partially recover the list-decoding capacity theorem, the Blinovsky bound and the combinatorial bound of Guruswami-H{aa}stad-Sudan-Zuckerman. We also suggest to study the combinatorial covering list-decodable codes as a natural generalization of combinatorial list-decodable codes.
Streaming codes represent a packet-level FEC scheme for achieving reliable, low-latency communication. In the literature on streaming codes, the commonly-assumed Gilbert-Elliott channel model, is replaced by a more tractable, delay-constrained, sliding-window (DCSW) channel model that can introduce either random or burst erasures. The known streaming codes that are rate optimal over the DCSW channel model are constructed by diagonally embedding a scalar block code across successive packets. These code constructions have field size that is quadratic in the delay parameter $tau$ and have a somewhat complex structure with an involved decoding procedure. This led to the introduction of simple streaming (SS) codes in which diagonal embedding is replaced by staggered-diagonal embedding (SDE). The SDE approach reduces the impact of a burst of erasures and makes it possible to construct near-rate-optimal streaming codes using Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) code having linear field size. The present paper takes this development one step further, by retaining the staggered-diagonal feature, but permitting the placement of more than one code symbol from a given scalar codeword within each packet. These generalized, simple streaming codes allow us to improve upon the rate of SS codes, while retaining the simplicity of working with MDS codes. We characterize the maximum code rate of streaming codes under a constraint on the number of contiguous packets over which symbols of the underlying scalar code are dispersed. Such a constraint leads to simplified code construction and reduced-complexity decoding.