Paper 2025/1674 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2025/1674 ↗

Secure Rate-Distortion-Perception Trade-Off with Side Information

Abstract

Secure rate-distortion-perception (RDP) trade-offs are relevant for applications such as semantic compression, where the perceptual quality needs to be maximized. We study a framework for secure RDP over an ideal public communication channel in the presence of an eavesdropper, where the legitimate parties also have access to side information correlated with the source. The exact rate region for the secure RDP trade-off is established when both the encoder and the decoder have access to the side information. We then characterize an inner bound when only the decoder has access to the side information and establish the exact region for a special case. Moreover, we provide an RDP example to illustrate remarkable gains in communication rate due to common randomness, which is not possible to obtain for rate-distortion trade-offs. Our results show that binning-based schemes can achieve high perceptual quality, low distortion, and strong secrecy simultaneously, establishing the information-theoretic limits for next-generation trustworthy semantic compression systems.