Compressing Encrypted Data: Achieving Optimality and Strong Secrecy via Permutations

In a system that performs both encryption and lossy compression, the conventional way is to compress first and then encrypt the compressed data. This separation approach has been proved to be optimal. In certain applications where sensitive information should be protected as early as possible, it is preferable to perform the encryption first and then compress the encrypted data, which leads to the concept of the reversed system. Johnson et al. proposed an achievable scheme for the reversed system, where a modulo-sum encryption is followed by a compression using the Wyner–Ziv distributed source coding with side information. However, in general, this reversed system performs worse than the conventional system in the sense that it requires more compression rate and secrecy key rate. In this paper, we propose a new achievable scheme for the reversed system, where the encryption is conducted by a permutation cipher, and then, the encrypted data is compressed using the optimal rate-distortion code. The proposed scheme can achieve the optimal compression rate and secret key rate. As a result, we show that reversing the order of the encryption and compression does not necessarily compromise the performance of an encryption-compression system. We show that the proposed system attains strong secrecy, and the information leakage vanishes exponentially.