Due to the redundant nature of DNA synthesis and sequencing technologies, a basic model for a DNA storage system is a multi-draw "shuffling-sampling" channel. In this model, a random number of noisy copies of each sequence is observed at the channel output. Recent works have characterized the capacity of such a DNA storage channel under different noise and sequencing models, relying on sophisticated typicality-based approaches for the achievability. Here, we consider a multi-draw DNA storage channel in the setting of noise corruption by a binary erasure channel. We show that, in this setting, the capacity is achieved by linear coding schemes. This leads to a considerably simpler derivation of the capacity expression of a multi-draw DNA storage channel than existing results in the literature.
We establish the capacity of a class of communication channels introduced in [1]. The $n$-letter input from a finite alphabet is passed through a discrete memoryless channel $P_{Z|X}$ and then the output $n$-letter sequence is uniformly permuted. We show that the maximal communication rate (normalized by $\log n$) equals $1/2 (rank(P_{Z|X})-1)$ whenever $P_{Z|X}$ is strictly positive. This is done by establishing a converse bound matching the achievability of [1]. The two main ingredients of our proof are (1) a sharp bound on the entropy of a uniformly sampled vector from a type class and observed through a DMC; and (2) the covering $\epsilon$-net of a probability simplex with Kullback-Leibler divergence as a metric. In addition to strictly positive DMC we also find the noisy permutation capacity for $q$-ary erasure channels, the Z-channel and others.
We are interested in investigating the security of source encryption with a symmetric key under side-channel attacks. In this paper, we propose a general framework of source encryption with a symmetric key under the side-channel attacks, which applies to \emph{any} source encryption with a symmetric key and \emph{any} kind of side-channel attacks targeting the secret key. We also propose a new security criterion for strong secrecy under side-channel attacks, which is a natural extension of mutual information, i.e., \emph{the maximum conditional mutual information between the plaintext and the ciphertext given the adversarial key leakage, where the maximum is taken over all possible plaintext distribution}. Under this new criterion, we successfully formulate the rate region, which serves as both necessary and sufficient conditions to have secure transmission even under side-channel attacks. Furthermore, we also prove another theoretical result on our new security criterion, which might be interesting in its own right: in the case of the discrete memoryless source, no perfect secrecy under side-channel attacks in the standard security criterion, i.e., the ordinary mutual information, is achievable without achieving perfect secrecy in this new security criterion, although our new security criterion is more strict than the standard security criterion.
We consider a basic communication and sensing setup comprising a transmitter, a receiver and a sensor. The transmitter sends an encoded sequence to the receiver through a discrete memoryless channel, and the receiver is interested in decoding the sequence. On the other hand, the sensor picks up a noisy version of the transmitted sequence through one of two possible discrete memoryless channels. The sensor knows the transmitted sequence and wishes to discriminate between the two possible channels, i.e. to identify the channel that has generated the output given the input. We study the trade-off between communication and sensing in the asymptotic regime, captured in terms of the coding rate to the receiver against the discrimination error exponent at the sensor. We characterize the optimal rate-exponent trade-off for general discrete memoryless channels with an input cost constraint.
We study reliable communication over point-to-point adversarial channels in which the adversary can observe the codeword via some function that takes the $n$-bit codeword as input and computes an $rn$-bit output. We consider the scenario where the $rn$-bit observation is computationally bounded -- the adversary is free to choose an arbitrary observation function as long as the function can be computed using a polynomial amount of computational resources. This observation-based restriction differs from conventional channel-based computational limitations, where in the later case, the resource limitation applies to the computation of the channel error. For some number $r^* \in [0,1]$ and for $r \in [0,r^*]$, we characterize the capacity of the above channel. For this range of $r$, we find that the capacity is identical to the completely obvious setting ($r=0$). This result can be viewed as a generalization of known results on myopic adversaries and channels with active eavesdroppers for which the observation process depends on a fixed distribution and fixed-linear structure, respectively, that cannot be chosen arbitrarily by the adversary.
Spectrally efficient communication is studied for short-reach fiber-optic links with chromatic dispersion (CD) and receivers that employ direction-detection and oversampling. Achievable rates and symbol error probabilities are computed by using auxiliary channels that account for memory in the sampled symbol strings. Real-alphabet bipolar and complex-alphabet symmetric modulations are shown to achieve significant energy gains over classic intensity modulation. Moreover, frequency-domain raised-cosine (FD-RC) pulses outperform time-domain RC (TD-RC) pulses in terms of spectral efficiency for two scenarios. First, if one shares the spectrum with other users then inter-channel interference significantly reduces the TD-RC rates. Second, if there is a transmit filter to avoid interference then the detection complexity of FD-RC and TD-RC pulses is similar but FD-RC achieves higher rates.
In this paper we are concerned with Trefftz discretizations of the time-dependent linear wave equation in anisotropic media in arbitrary space dimensional domains $\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^d~ (d\in \mathbb{N})$. We propose two variants of the Trefftz DG method, define novel plane wave basis functions based on rigorous choices of scaling transformations and coordinate transformations, and prove that the corresponding approximate solutions possess optimal-order error estimates with respect to the meshwidth $h$ and the condition number of the coefficient matrices, respectively. Besides, we propose the global Trefftz DG method combined with local DG methods to solve the time-dependent linear nonhomogeneous wave equation in anisotropic media. In particular, the error analysis holds for the (nonhomogeneous) Dirichlet, Neumann, and mixed boundary conditions from the original PDEs. Furthermore, a strategy to discretize the model in heterogeneous media is proposed. The numerical results verify the validity of the theoretical results, and show that the resulting approximate solutions possess high accuracy.
In this paper, we are interested in the performance of a variable-length stop-feedback (VLSF) code with $m$ optimal decoding times for the binary-input additive white Gaussian noise channel. We first develop tight approximations on the tail probability of length-$n$ cumulative information density. Building on the work of Yavas \emph{et al.}, for a given information density threshold, we formulate the integer program of minimizing the upper bound on average blocklength over all decoding times subject to the average error probability, minimum gap and integer constraints. Eventually, minimization of locally minimum upper bounds over all thresholds will yield the globally minimum upper bound and this is called the two-step minimization. For the integer program, we present a greedy algorithm that yields possibly suboptimal integer decoding times. By allowing a positive real-valued decoding time, we develop the gap-constrained sequential differential optimization (SDO) procedure that sequentially produces the optimal, real-valued decoding times. We identify the error regime in which Polyanskiy's scheme of stopping at zero does not improve the achievability bound. In this error regime, the two-step minimization with the gap-constrained SDO shows that a finite $m$ suffices to attain Polyanskiy's bound for VLSF codes with $m = \infty$.
In this paper, we consider the problem of evaluating capacity expression of a multiple access channel (MAC) with noiseless feedback. So far, the capacity expression for this channel is known through a multi letter directed information by Kramer [1]. Recently, it was shown in [2] that one can pose it as a dynamic optimization problem, however, no dynamic program was provided as the authors claimed there is no notion of state that is observed by both the senders. In this paper, we build upon [2] to show that there indeed exists a state and therefore a dynamic program (DP) that decomposes this dynamic optimization problem, and equivalently a Bellman fixed-point equation to evaluate capacity of this channel. We do so by defining a common belief on private messages and private beliefs of the two senders, and using this common belief as state of the system. We further show that this DP can be further reduced to a DP with state as the common belief on just the messages. This provides a single letter characterization of the capacity of this channel.
Certifying the robustness of model performance under bounded data distribution shifts has recently attracted intensive interests under the umbrella of distributional robustness. However, existing techniques either make strong assumptions on the model class and loss functions that can be certified, such as smoothness expressed via Lipschitz continuity of gradients, or require to solve complex optimization problems. As a result, the wider application of these techniques is currently limited by its scalability and flexibility -- these techniques often do not scale to large-scale datasets with modern deep neural networks or cannot handle loss functions which may be non-smooth, such as the 0-1 loss. In this paper, we focus on the problem of certifying distributional robustness for black box models and bounded losses, without other assumptions. We propose a novel certification framework given bounded distance of mean and variance of two distributions. Our certification technique scales to ImageNet-scale datasets, complex models, and a diverse range of loss functions. We then focus on one specific application enabled by such scalability and flexibility, i.e., certifying out-of-domain generalization for large neural networks and loss functions such as accuracy and AUC. We experimentally validate our certification method on a number of datasets, ranging from ImageNet, where we provide the first non-vacuous certified out-of-domain generalization, to smaller classification tasks where we are able to compare with the state-of-the-art and show that our method performs considerably better.
In order to protect devices from physical manipulations, protective security enclosures were developed. However, these battery-backed solutions come with a reduced lifetime, and have to be actively and continuously monitored. In order to overcome these drawbacks, batteryless capacitive enclosures based on Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have been developed that generate a key-encryption-key (KEK) for decryption of the key chain. In order to reproduce the PUF-key reliably and to compensate the effect of noise and environmental influences, the key generation includes error correction codes. However, drilling attacks that aim at partially destroying the enclosure also alter the PUF-response and are subjected to the same error correction procedures. Correcting attack effects, however, is highly undesirable as it would destroy the security concept of the enclosure. In general, designing error correction codes such that they provide tamper-sensitivity to attacks, while still correcting noise and environmental effects is a challenging task. We tackle this problem by first analyzing the behavior of the PUF-response under external influences and different post-processing parameters. From this, we derive a system model of the PUF-based enclosure, and construct a wiretap channel implementation from $q$-ary polar codes. We verify the obtained error correction scheme in a Monte Carlo simulation and demonstrate that our wiretap channel implementation achieves a physical layer security of 100 bits for 240 bits of entropy for the PUF-secret. Through this, we further develop capacitive PUF-based security enclosures and bring them one step closer to their commercial deployment.