Secrecy via Sources and Channels

Alice and Bob want to share a secret key and to communicate an independent message, both of which they desire to be kept secret from an eavesdropper Eve. This problem of secret communication and secret-key generation when two resources are available-correlated sources at Alice, Bob, and Eve, and a noisy broadcast channel from Alice to Bob and Eve which is independent of the sources is studied. The goal is to characterize the fundamental tradeoff between the rates of the secret message and secret key. An achievable solution and proof of its optimality for the parallel channels and sources case when each subchannel and source component satisfies a degradation order (either in favor of the legitimate receiver or the eavesdropper) is presented. This includes the case of jointly Gaussian sources and an additive Gaussian channel, for which the secrecy region is evaluated.