My current research focuses on multi-user information theory, cooperative communications, physical-layer security, and privacy in datasets. I am also interested in the connections between information theory and other fields.
Due to the open nature of the wireless medium, transmissions can be easily eavesdropped, and thus any sensitive communication must be protected. Information-theoretic security provides guarantees on the amount of information (on the physical level) that is leaked to an adversary; these guarantees are independent of the computational power the adversary possesses. In order to achieve a secure communication, the legitimate users must exploit the natural randomness present in the wireless medium, e.g., the noise or the channel statistics, in their favor.
In this area, my main contributions are on the characterization of the achievable secrecy rates for the wiretap model with feedback and the optimal secret key rates in a extended source/channel model.
G. Bassi, P. Piantanida, and S. Shamai, “The Secret Key Capacity of a Class of Noisy Channels with Correlated Sources,” Entropy, vol. 21, no. 8, Jul. 2019. DOI
G. Bassi, P. Piantanida, and S. Shamai, “The Wiretap Channel with Generalized Feedback: Secure Communication and Key Generation,” IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. 65, no. 4, pp. 2213–2233, Apr. 2019. DOI arXiv
There is a benefit in sharing data; users may be inclined to do it in order to obtain access to certain services (e.g., social networks) or enjoy discounts (e.g., loyalty programs) but also to anonymously contribute to society (e.g., sharing medical records for large-scale studies). However, privacy-aware users may be concerned that the released data is used to infer sensitive information that they do not want to disclose.
In this area, my main contributions are in the analysis of privacy-aware data-disclosure strategies, where the data is distorted before being released.
G. Bassi and M. Skoglund, “On the mutual information of two Boolean functions, with application to privacy,” in 2019 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), Jul. 2019, pp. 1197–1201. DOI
G. Bassi, P. Piantanida, and M. Skoglund, “Lossy communication subject to statistical parameter privacy,” in 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), Jun. 2018, pp. 1031–1035. DOI