Achieving Optimal Short-Blocklength Secrecy Rate Using Multi-Kernel PAC Codes for the Binary Erasure Wiretap Channel

We investigate practical short-blocklength coding for the semi-deterministic binary erasure wiretap channel (BE-WTC), where the main channel to the legitimate receiver is noiseless, and the eavesdropper's channel is a binary erasure channel (BEC). It is shown that under the average total variation distance secrecy metric, multi-kernel polarization-adjusted convolutional (MK-PAC) codes can achieve the best possible theoretical secrecy rate at blocklengths of 16, 32, 64, and 128 if the secrecy leakage is less than or equal to certain values.
Comment: Paper accepted for presentation at the 2024 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory and Its Applications (ISITA 2024)