Coding for relay channels with confidential messages

We consider a relay channel where a relay helps the transmission of messages from one sender to one receiver. The relay is considered not only as a sender that helps the message transmission but as a wire-tapper who can obtain some knowledge about the transmitted messages. In this paper we study the coding problem of the relay channel under the situation that some of transmitted messages are confidential to the relay. A security of such confidential messages is measured by the conditional entropy. We derive an explicit inner bound of the capacity region characterized with the set of transmission rates for which messages are reliably transmitted and the security of confidential messages is larger than a prescribed level.