A two-class information concealing system based on compressed sensing

We elaborate on the possibility of exploiting the (pseudo)random projection operator, which is at the heart of the most common architecture for compressed sensing, to prevent access to the acquired information by unauthorized receivers. In low-resource applications, this approach may make dedicated cryptographic layers unnecessary when the security requirement is not particularly high. Beyond proving that the proposed system is at least asymptotically immune to straightforward statistical attacks, we also exploit the sensitivity of compressed sensing recovery algorithms to the complete knowledge of the projection matrix to introduce two-class protection. The encoding is such that first-class decoders can retrieve the signal to its full resolution while second-class decoders are able to retrieve only a degraded version of the same signal. Examples are given with reference to ECG signal acquisition. © 2013 IEEE.