Gerhard Kramer

Muhammed Yusuf Sener, Gerhard Kramer, Shlomo Shamai et al.

Scalar quantization and probabilistic shaping are applied to the distributed source coding of Gaussian sources, with mean-square error distortion. A coding scheme with a modulo interval, dithering, and truncated Gaussian shaping is shown to achieve the corner points of the Berger-Tung region. The theory is illustrated by designing short-block-length multilevel 5G polar codes for Wyner-Ziv (WZ) polar coded quantization (PCQ). WZ-PCQ substantially reduces the total distortion compared to separate PCQ of the source blocks.

Amin Gohari, Gerhard Kramer

An information measure based on fractional partitions of a set is used to derive a general dependence balance inequality for communication. This inequality is used to obtain new upper bounds on reliable and secret rates for multiterminal channels. For example, we obtain a new upper bound on the rate of shared randomness generated among terminals, a counterpart of the cut-set bound for reliable communication. The bounds for reliable communication use the concept of auxiliary receivers, and we show that they are optimized by Gaussian distributions for Gaussian channels. The bounds are applied to multiaccess channels with generalized feedback and relay channels, and improve the cut-set bound for scalar Gaussian channels. The improvement for Gaussian relay channels complements results obtained with other methods.

Daniel Plabst, Mohamed Akrout, Tobias Prinz et al.

The capacity of bandlimited direct-detection channels is challenging to compute or approach due to the receiver non-linearity. A generalized vector approximate message passing (GVAMP) detector is designed to achieve high rates at a reasonable level of complexity. The rates increase by using multi-level coding and successive interference cancellation. The methods are applied to fiber-optic channels with intersymbol interference caused by spectrally efficient pulse shapes, chromatic dispersion, and receiver sampling at twice the baud rate. Bipolar modulation operates within 0.26 bits per channel use (bpcu) of the real-alphabet coherent capacity for optically amplified links, reducing the best-known theoretical gap of 1 bpcu. Remarkably, bipolar modulation achieves 6 dB and 3 dB of power gain over unipolar modulation with and without optical amplification, respectively. Simulations with polar-coded modulation confirm the gains. The GVAMP complexity, measured in multiplications per information bit (mpib), is proportional to the number of iterations and to the logarithm of the block length, and is substantially lower than that of other equalizers. For example, a system with 64-ary bipolar modulation and a root-raised cosine pulse with a 1% roll-off factor was simulated over 4 km of optically amplified standard single-mode fiber in the C-band. The GVAMP receiver requires 93 mpib to achieve 5 bpcu at 300 gigabaud.

Alex Jäger, Gerhard Kramer

A non-iterative phase noise compensation method based on the sum-product algorithm (SPA) is applied to the outputs of intersymbol interference (ISI) channels. The outputs are modeled as independent Gaussian random variables, and the receiver applies mismatched processing with von Mises statistics. The performance is compared with that of linear minimum-mean-square-error filtering. The SPA achieves higher information rates at similar complexity for three channel types: ISI-free, standard single-mode fiber, and multipath channels with orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing.

Thomas Jerkovits, Onur Günlü, Vladimir Sidorenko et al.

A key agreement problem is considered that has a biometric or physical identifier, a terminal for key enrollment, and a terminal for reconstruction. A nested convolutional code design is proposed that performs vector quantization during enrollment and error control during reconstruction. Physical identifiers with small bit error probability illustrate the gains of the design. One variant of the nested convolutional codes improves on the best known key vs. storage rate ratio but it has high complexity. A second variant with lower complexity performs similar to nested polar codes. The results suggest that the choice of code for key agreement with identifiers depends primarily on the complexity constraint.

Onur Günlü, Tasnad Kernetzky, Onurcan İşcan et al.

Different transforms used in binding a secret key to correlated physical-identifier outputs are compared. Decorrelation efficiency is the metric used to determine transforms that give highly-uncorrelated outputs. Scalar quantizers are applied to transform outputs to extract uniformly distributed bit sequences to which secret keys are bound. A set of transforms that perform well in terms of the decorrelation efficiency is applied to ring oscillator (RO) outputs to improve the uniqueness and reliability of extracted bit sequences, to reduce the hardware area and information leakage about the key and RO outputs, and to maximize the secret-key length. Low-complexity error-correction codes are proposed to illustrate two complete key-binding systems with perfect secrecy, and better secret-key and privacy-leakage rates than existing methods. A reference hardware implementation is also provided to demonstrate that the transform-coding approach occupies a small hardware area.

Onur Günlü, Rafael F. Schaefer, Gerhard Kramer

A basic model for key agreement with biometric or physical identifiers is extended to include measurements of a hidden source through a general broadcast channel (BC). An inner bound for strong secrecy, maximum key rate, and minimum privacy-leakage and database-storage rates is proposed. The inner bound is shown to be tight for physically-degraded and less-noisy BCs.

Onur Günlü, Onurcan İşcan, Vladimir Sidorenko et al.

The two-terminal key agreement problem with biometric or physical identifiers is considered. Two linear code constructions based on Wyner-Ziv coding are developed. The first construction uses random linear codes and achieves all points of the key-leakage-storage regions of the generated-secret and chosen-secret models. The second construction uses nested polar codes for vector quantization during enrollment and for error correction during reconstruction. Simulations show that the nested polar codes achieve privacy-leakage and storage rates that improve on existing code designs. One proposed code achieves a rate tuple that cannot be achieved by existing methods.

Onur Günlü, Gerhard Kramer

The key-leakage-storage region is derived for a generalization of a classic two-terminal key agreement model. The additions to the model are that the encoder observes a hidden, or noisy, version of the identifier, and that the encoder and decoder can perform multiple measurements. To illustrate the behavior of the region, the theory is applied to binary identifiers and noise modeled via binary symmetric channels. In particular, the key-leakage-storage region is simplified by applying Mrs. Gerber's lemma twice in different directions to a Markov chain. The growth in the region as the number of measurements increases is quantified. The amount by which the privacy-leakage rate reduces for a hidden identifier as compared to a noise-free (visible) identifier at the encoder is also given. If the encoder incorrectly models the source as visible, it is shown that substantial secrecy leakage may occur and the reliability of the reconstructed key might decrease.

Jie Hou, Gerhard Kramer

A security measure called effective security is defined that includes strong secrecy and stealth communication. Effective secrecy ensures that a message cannot be deciphered and that the presence of meaningful communication is hidden. To measure stealth we use resolvability and relate this to binary hypothesis testing. Results are developed for wire-tap channels and broadcast channels with confidential messages.