A method and system provide for secure sharing of arbitrary data between users with limited mutual trust. A user can encode its information by using a Slepian-Wolf code at a rate which enables a second user to correctly decode only if the side-information it has satisfies a conditional entropy constraint. The key advantages are as follows. Firstly, it is very flexible, in that it enables secure sharing for general data including multimedia data. Secondly, by appropriate Slepian-Wolf code selection, it enables compression in conjunction with security. Thirdly, it can be used for the case where the data model is imperfectly known and trust is to be built up incrementally.