Secretive Hotplug Coded Caching

2025-07-18

AI Summary

This work addresses information-theoretic secrecy in hot-plug coded caching systems under user offline scenarios. Specifically, it ensures that no user—whether online or offline—can learn any information about files they did not request, either from their local cache or from the server’s transmission; moreover, offline users cannot infer the demands of active users. To this end, we propose the first Hot-plug Placement and Delivery Array (HpPDA) framework incorporating confidentiality constraints. Our method integrates classical PDA structures with secret sharing and artificial noise injection, yielding two novel confidential coding schemes. Theoretical analysis and numerical evaluations demonstrate that the proposed schemes achieve strictly lower delivery load than all applicable baseline confidential schemes within specific memory regimes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to jointly optimize information-theoretic security and system flexibility—namely, dynamic user participation—under the hot-plug model.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Neural Spike Coding
• Machine Learning: Privacy

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Applications of cryptography
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User privacy protection in personalized systems
• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web

Abstract

In this work, we consider a coded caching model called extit{hotplug coded caching}, in which some users are offline during the delivery phase. The concept of Hotplug Placement Delivery Arrays (HpPDAs) for hotplug coded caching systems has been introduced in the literature, and two classes of HpPDAs are known. In this paper, we consider a secrecy constraint in hotplug coded caching setup, where users should not learn anything about any file from their cache content, and active users should not gain any information about files other than their demanded file from either their cache content or the server transmissions. We propose two secretive schemes for the two classes of HpPDAs and compare them with a baseline scheme, which is a secretive scheme using PDAs for the classical coded caching setup and can be trivially adapted for the hotplug coded caching setup. We numerically show that our schemes outperform the baseline scheme in certain memory regions.

Problem

• Ensuring secrecy in hotplug coded caching systems
• Preventing information leakage from cache and transmissions
• Improving performance over baseline in specific memory regions

Innovation

• Hotplug Placement Delivery Arrays for caching
• Secrecy-constrained user data protection
• Improved performance in specific memory regions