Universally optimal (wiretap) codes

Abstract

Universally optimal (UO) codes were introduced by H. Cohn and A. Kumar in 2007 and later extended to the discrete setting by Cohn and Y. Zhao. They minimize the ``energy'' among all codes of the same size for a certain class of potential functions. So far only a small number of specific functionals have been linked to information theory problems. We add one more, showing that UO codes optimize $\alpha$-mutual information for $\alpha =2$ in the context of wiretap channels with a noiseless main channel. This implies that UO codes are optimal for transmission over this type of wiretap channels.

Accepted to IEEE ISIT 2026