  We consider the communication scenario where a source-destination pair wishes
to keep the information secret from a relay node despite wanting to enlist its
help. For this scenario, an interesting question is whether the relay node
should be deployed at all. That is, whether cooperation with an untrusted relay
node can ever be beneficial. We first provide an achievable secrecy rate for
the general untrusted relay channel, and proceed to investigate this question
for two types of relay networks with orthogonal components. For the first
model, there is an orthogonal link from the source to the relay. For the second
model, there is an orthogonal link from the relay to the destination. For the
first model, we find the equivocation capacity region and show that answer is
negative. In contrast, for the second model, we find that the answer is
positive. Specifically, we show by means of the achievable secrecy rate based
on compress-and-forward, that, by asking the untrusted relay node to relay
information, we can achieve a higher secrecy rate than just treating the relay
as an eavesdropper. For a special class of the second model, where the relay is
not interfering itself, we derive an upper bound for the secrecy rate using an
argument whose net effect is to separate the eavesdropper from the relay. The
merit of the new upper bound is demonstrated on two channels that belong to
this special class. The Gaussian case of the second model mentioned above
benefits from this approach in that the new upper bound improves the previously
known bounds. For the Cover-Kim deterministic relay channel, the new upper
bound finds the secrecy capacity when the source-destination link is not worse
than the source-relay link, by matching with the achievable rate we present.
