Authentication over Arbitrarily Varying Channels with Causal Adversaries

Abstract

We study authentication over a discrete memoryless arbitrarily varying channel (AVC) in which the adversary selects the channel state causally based on past channel outputs. We prove that the authentication capacity is positive exactly when the channel is not distribution-overwritable under stochastic encoding, and not I-overwritable under deterministic encoding. In the stochastic case, whenever the authentication capacity is positive, it coincides with the no-adversary Shannon capacity. Both converses follow from a novel wait-and-overwrite attack: the adversary tracks the no-adversary posterior over the message via the posterior guessing probability, and once it concentrates past a threshold, it samples a guess and a decoy from the posterior and overwrites the channel to mimic a no-adversary transmission of the decoy. The positivity results are obtained by constructing positive-rate codes with controlled overlap between codewords, together with a martingale concentration argument that handles adaptive adversarial strategies. For stochastic encoding, the full-capacity achievability further combines a capacity-achieving channel code with an authentication tag. These characterizations separate the causal stochastic-code and causal deterministic-code settings from each other and from the oblivious-adversary setting studied by Kosut and Kliewer.