Secrecy Analysis of Finite-Precision Compressive Cryptosystems

Compressed sensing (CS) has recently emerged as an effective and efficient way to encrypt data. Under certain conditions, it has been shown to provide some secrecy notions. In theory, it could be considered to be a perfect match for constrained devices needing to acquire and protect the data with computationally cheap operations. However, the theoretical results on the secrecy of compressive cryptosystems only hold under the assumption of infinite precision representation. With this work, we aim to close this gap and lay the theoretical foundations to support this practical framework. We provide theoretical upper bounds on the distinguishability of the measurements acquired through finite precision sensing matrices and experimentally validate them. Our main result is that the secrecy of a CS cryptosystem can be exponentially increased with a linear increase in the representation precision. This result confirms that the CS can be an effective secrecy layer and provides tools to use it in practical settings.