Testing Against Conditional Independence Under Security Constraints

A distributed binary hypothesis testing problem involving three parties, a remote node, called the observer, a legitimate decoder, called the detector, and an adversary, is studied. The remote node observes a discrete memoryless source, and communicates its observations over a rate-limited noiseless public channel to the detector, which tests for the conditional independence of its own observations from that of the remote node, conditioned on some additional side information. The adversary, in addition to observing the public message, has access to its own correlated side-information. Considering the type 2 error exponent for a given type 1 error probability constraint as the performance measure for the hypothesis test at the detector, and equivocation of the source at the adversary as the secrecy measure, a single-letter characterization of the rate-error exponent-equivocation trade-off is established. Additionally, for a general distortion measure, imposing the average distortion at the adversary as the measure of secrecy achieved, an inner bound on the trade-off between the rate, error exponent and average distortion is obtained. This bound is shown to be tight under the less noisy condition on the adversary's side information.