Characterization of Secrecy Capacity for General MSR Codes under Passive Eavesdropping Model

In this paper, we revisit the problem of characterizing the secrecy capacity of MSR codes under the passive {l1, l2}-eavesdropper model, where the eavesdropper has access to data stored on l1 nodes as well as the repair traffic for an additional l2 nodes. We analyze the secrecy capacity of MSR codes from an information theory perspective. Specifically, we investigate the basic reconstruction and regeneration properties of MSR codes and find some information theoretic features on the contents of storage nodes as well as repair traffic. Leveraging these properties with a definition of the secrecy capacity, we derive new upper bounds on the secrecy capacity for MSR codes. These explicit upper bounds on the secrecy capacity bring out an interesting fact that the secrecy capacity of MSR codes is not only related to {l1, l2}, but also closely depends on ?, the amount of data downloaded from each helper node during the repair process. Similar bounds on the secrecy capacity in the literature are either restricted to the situation that l2\leq2, or based on the assumption of linear coding. To the best of our knowledge, this is a novel characterization of the secrecy capacity of general MSR codes without the above constraints.