Coding across unicast sessions can increase the secure message capacity

This paper characterizes the secret message capacity of three networks where two unicast sessions share some of the communication resources. Each network consists of erasure channels with state feedback. A passive eavesdropper is assumed to wiretap any one of the links. The capacity achieving schemes as well as the outer bounds are formulated as linear programs. The proposed strategies are then numerically evaluated and shown to achieve higher rate performances (up to a double single- or sum-rate) with respect to alternative strategies, where the network resources are time-shared among the two sessions. These results represent a step towards the secure capacity characterization for general networks. They also show that, even in configurations for which network coding does not offer benefits in absence of security, it can become beneficial under security constraints.