The Lossless CEO Problem with Security Constraints

In this paper, we investigate the problem of transmitting a remote information source to a single destination via multiple agents in the presence of an eavesdropper. The agents observe noisy versions of the source, then, compress and transmit their observations to the destination via noiseless rate-limited links. The destination should reconstruct the remote source based on the information received from the agents. The eavesdropper, with access to side information correlated with the source, can eavesdrop one of the links from the agents to the destination to obtain as much information as possible about the source. For this problem, we determine the rates at which the agents should transmit such that the destination can recover the source while the equivocation at the eavesdropper node is maximized. We derive inner and outer bounds on the compression-equivocation region. Furthermore, we obtain the compression-equivocation region in special cases where the bounds are tight.