Secrecy capacity of wiretap channels with the bit error rate criterion

Abstract

The coding problem over wiretap channels is to realize an encoder and a decoder such that the legitimate receiver can correctly decode transmitted secret messages while the eavesdropper knows little about the secret messages. Traditionally, the secrecy of messages to the eavesdropper has been measured in terms of mutual information. Recently, several researches on the wiretap channels employ the bit error rate after decoding by the eavesdropper as a secrecy measure. In this note, we show that the secrecy capacity with respect to the bit error rate criterion is different from that with the traditional mutual information criterion. In addition to that, the encoder can be deterministic for the bit error rate criterion, while it must be stochastic for the mutual information criterion.