Secure Decentralized Pliable Index Coding

Abstract

This paper studies a variant of the Pliable Index CODing (PICOD) problem, i.e., an index coding problem where a user can be satisfied by decoding any message that is not in its side information set, where communication is decentralized, i.e., it occurs among users rather than by the central server, and secure, i.e., each user is allowed to decode only one message outside its side information set and must not be able to collect any information about any other message that is not its decoded one. Given the difficulty of the general version of this problem, this paper focuses on the case where the side information sets are `\(s\)~circular shifts', namely, user \(u\)'s side information set is the set of messages indexed by \(\{u, u+1, \ldots, u+s-1\}\) for some fixed \(s\) and where the indices are intended modulo the cardinality of the message set. This particular setting has been studied in the `decentralized non-secure' and in the `centralized secure' settings, thus allows one to quantify the cost of decentralized communication under security constraints on the number of transmissions. Interestingly, the decentralized vs the centralized secure setting incurs a multiplicative gap of approximately~three. This is in contrast to the cases without security constraint, where the multiplicative gap is known to be at most two.