Polar codes have been proven to be capacity achieving for any binary-input discrete memoryless channel, while at the same time they can reassure secure and reliable transmission over the single-input single-output wireless channel. However, the use of polar codes to secure multiple-antenna transmission and reception has not yet been reported in the open literature. In this paper, we assume a multiple-input multiple-output wiretap channel, where the legitimate receiver and the eavesdropper are equipped with the same number of antennas. We introduce a protocol that exploits the properties of both physical and media access control layer security by employing polar coding and encryption techniques in a hybrid manner in order to guarantee secure transmission. A novel security technique is also proposed, where a cryptographic key is generated based on the information transmitted and renewed every transmission block without the need for a separate key exchange method. Finally, to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed protocol, we prove the weak and strong security conditions, and we provide a practical method to achieve computational security for the cases where these conditions cannot be established.
Polar codes have been proven to be capacity achieving for any binary-input discrete memoryless channel, while at the same time they can reassure secure and reliable transmission over the single-input single-output wireless channel. However, the use of polar codes to secure multiple-antenna transmission and reception has not yet been reported in the open literature. In this paper, we assume a multiple-input multiple-output wiretap channel, where the legitimate receiver and the eavesdropper are equipped with the same number of antennas. We introduce a protocol that exploits the properties of both physical and media access control layer security by employing polar coding and encryption techniques in a hybrid manner in order to guarantee secure transmission. A novel security technique is also proposed, where a cryptographic key is generated based on the information transmitted and renewed every transmission block without the need for a separate key exchange method. Finally, to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed protocol, we prove the weak and strong security conditions, and we provide a practical method to achieve computational security for the cases where these conditions cannot be established.
This chapter considers securing wireless communications at the physical layer using multiple antennas. In particular, the multiple antenna (MIMO) wiretap channel is presented and its secrecy capacity is provided. Further investigation of the high-SNR characterization of the secrecy capacity, i.e., secure degrees of freedom, reveals that the secrecy capacity of the MIMO wiretap channel does not scale with the transmit power when the eavesdropper has an advantage over the legitimate transmitter in the number of antennas. An external multi-antenna cooperative jammer terminal is introduced to the channel model in order to improve its secrecy capacity scaling with power. The secure degrees of freedom for this new multi-terminal multi-antenna channel is characterized. While for these models the eavesdropper channel state information is known at the legitimate terminals, the chapter next removes this assumption and presents results that utilize multiple antennas in order to provide secure communications irrespective of the eavesdropper channel state. An achievable strong secrecy rate and the secure degrees of freedom characterization for the MIMO wiretap channel when the eavesdropper channel is arbitrary, varying, and unknown at the legitimate terminals are presented. Finally, the extension of this model to the two-user multiple access MIMO wiretap channel is considered and its secure degrees of freedom region is characterized. Introduction The wiretap channel and the notion of secrecy capacity, introduced in [1] and generalized by [2], have provided the framework for physical layer design for wireless channels with information theoretic guarantees against eavesdropping. A natural model in wireless communications is one which utilizes multiple antennas for transmission and reception at each node. The improvement in secrecy rate that can be obtained using multiple antennas in a point-to-point channel with an eavesdropper has been studied extensively in several references, including [3, 4]. Specifically, the secrecy capacity of the Gaussian model consisting of a multiple antenna legitimate transmitter, a multiple antenna legitimate receiver, and a multiple antenna eavesdropper, termed the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wiretap channel, has been identified in full generality in [5, 6].
Recently, MIMO (multiple-input-multiple-output) physical layer secure transmission has attracted great attentions. However, current schemes cannot defend against the passive eavesdroppers with arbitrary number of antennas. To address this problem, in this work, we propose a practical physical layer MIMO secure communication scheme (PLSC) to defend against such an eavesdropper with arbitrary number of antennas. In the proposed scheme, the transmitter first independently generates a random binary sequence as the “key bits (KB)” to “encrypt” (XOR) the confidential information. After that, the transmitter sends the “encrypted information” over the wireless channel, along with mapping key bits to the legitimate receiver simultaneously. The key principle lies in that the KB information is coded in the indexes of the activated/non-activated antennas combination of the legitimate user. Then, the legitimate receiver first observes his/her activated antenna indexes to obtain the corresponding key bits. After that, he/she demodulates the “encrypted information” at the activated antennas, and finally “decrypts” (XOR) the confidential information by using the observed key bits. However, due to the uniqueness and independence of MIMO wireless channel, for any other eavesdroppers who suffer an independent channel from legitimate users, we prove that it cannot observe any information about KB from the received signals, regardless of how many antennas it has used. Consequently, without knowledge of KB, it cannot decrypt any information about the confidential information, too. The reliability and security of PLSC are theoretically demonstrated. The simulation and numerical results fully verified the validity and effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
Achieving information theoretic security with practical coding complexity is of definite interest. This work first focuses on the key agreement problem. For this problem, a new cross-layer secure coding protocol over block fading channels is proposed. The proposed scheme requires only the statistical knowledge about the eavesdropper channel state information (CSI), and, utilizing a privacy amplification technique, reduces the problem of key agreement to a provably secure coding problem per block. Focusing on this secure coding problem, it is shown that polar codes, introduced by Arikan, achieve nonzero perfect secrecy rates for the binary-input degraded wiretap channel while enjoying a remarkably low encoding-decoding complexity. We further show that, in the special case of symmetric main and eavesdropper channels, this coding technique achieves the secrecy capacity. This approach is also extended to the multiple-access channel with a degraded eavesdropper where a nontrivial achievable secrecy region is established. This polar coding method is then utilized in the proposed key agreement protocol, where the secure coding per block is used to create an advantage for the legitimate nodes over the eavesdropper, which is then turned into a private key via the privacy amplification module.
A usual concern against physical layer security is that the legitimate parties would need to have (partial) channel state information (CSI) of the eavesdropper in order to design transmission schemes that provide secrecy. In this work, to overcome this concern, we consider the model where the eavesdropper's CSI is completely unknown at the legitimate transmitter(s) and the receiver. A static channel setting, and multiple antennas are considered for all parties, and it is assumed that the eavesdropper has perfect self-CSI. In this setting, assuming that the legitimate parties can employ a larger number of antennas than the eavesdropper, we provide a positive secure communication rate in the sense of strong secrecy. The achievable (guaranteed) secrecy rate we derive for the MIMO wiretap channel matches its converse in terms of secure degrees of freedom. As a side result of our approach, we also derive the secure degrees of freedom region for the MIMO MAC-wiretap channel where the transmitters and the intended receiver have the same number of antennas.
Traditional approaches for providing confidentiality of wirelessly transmitted signals are often based on cryptographic techniques. While these techniques ensure that messages are encrypted and secured against eavesdropping, they are not sufficient to protect important transmission attributes at the physical (PHY) layer. Specifically, several elds in the headers of PHY and medium access control (MAC) frames are typically sent unencrypted to maintain proper protocol functionality (e.g., sender/receiver identification). As a result, they leak side-channel information (SCI), including payload size, frequency and phase oset, modulation and coding scheme, identities of communication nodes, frame type, transmission rate, etc. These SCI can be exploited by an adversary to launch various passive (eavesdropping) and active (jamming) attacks. To complement cryptographic techniques used at upper layers and prevent the leakage of SCI at the PHY/MAC layers, PHY-layer security techniques have been introduced. These techniques exploit the characteristics of the wireless channel along with multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technologies, in which multiple transmitting and receiving antennas are utilized to prevent information leakage to eavesdroppers and/or avoid jamming attacks. In particular, if the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) at an adversary is lower than the one at a legitimate receiver, secure communication can be achieved through the so-called wiretap coding. MIMO systems enable the transmitter and/or the receiver to generate artificial noise, called friendly jamming (FJ), so as to reduce the SINR at the adversary without impacting the SINR at the legitimate receiver. In this dissertation, we focus on exploring the security threats to next-generation wireless systems. We develop MIMO-based PHY-layer security methods to achieve reliable and secret communications in these systems. First, we consider a broadcast channel, in which a multi-antenna transmitter (Alice) sends K confidential information signals to K legitimate receivers (Bobs) in the presence of L eavesdropping devices (Eves). Alice uses MIMO precoding to generate the information signals along with her own Tx-based friendly jamming (TxFJ). Interference at each Bob is removed via a technique called MIMO zero-forcing. This TxFJ, however, leaves an eavesdropping \vulnerability region" in the proximity of each Bob, which can be exploited by a nearby Eve. Specically, because of the high correlation in the channel state information (CSI) at a Bob and nearby Eves, the TxFJ becomes less effective in preventing eavesdropping at these Eves. We address this problem by augmenting TxFJ with receiver-based friendly jamming (RxFJ), generated by each Bob. Specifically, we allow each Bob to use self-interference suppression (SIS) techniques to transmit a friendly jamming signal while simultaneously receiving an information signal over the same channel. These SIS techniques exploit circulators to attenuate the self-interference power of RxFJ at Bobs and utilize analog/digital cancellation methods to clean out any remaining residual self-interference. Considering the resulting broadcast channel, we rst study a two-user scenario and develop a secrecy encoding scheme for constructing the signals intended to two Bobs. We characterize the corresponding achievable secrecy sum-rate and formulate an optimization problem to maximize this metric. We then extend our approach to K-user scenarios and study a power minimization problem. Particularly, in our analysis we minimize the powers allocated to information and friendly jamming signals (both TxFJ and RxFJ) while guaranteeing individual secrecy rates for various Bobs. The problem is solved for the cases when the eavesdropper's CSI (ECSI) is known or unknown (but with a known distribution). Simulations show the effectiveness of the proposed solutions. Furthermore, we discuss how to schedule transmissions when the rate requirements need to be satised on average rather than instantaneously. In low and high power regime, a scheduling algorithm that serves only the strongest receivers is shown to outperform the one that schedules all receivers. Next, we consider a single-cell massive MIMO system in which a base station (BS) with a large number of antennas transmits simultaneously to several single antenna users. The BS acquires the CSI for various receivers using uplink pilot transmissions. We demonstrate the vulnerability of the CSI estimation process to a pilot-contamination (PC) attack that aims at minimizing the sum-rate of downlink transmissions by contaminating uplink pilots. We rst study PC attacks for two downlink power allocation strategies under the assumption that the attacker knows the locations of the BS and its users. Later on, we relax this assumption and consider the case when such knowledge is probabilistic. The formulated problems are solved using stochastic optimization, Lagrangian minimization, and game-theoretic methods. A closed-form solution for a special case of the problem is obtained. Furthermore, we analyze the \achievable individual secrecy rates" under PC attacks, and provide an upper-bound on these rates. We also study this scenario without a priori knowledge of user locations at the attacker by introducing chance constraints. Another attack model is considered, where the attacker generates jamming signals in both the CSI estimation and data transmission phases by exploiting inband full-duplex techniques. Our results indicate that such attacks can degrade the throughput of a massive MIMO system by more than 50%, and reduce fairness among users significantly.
Due to the broadcast nature, wireless links are open to malicious intrusions from outsiders, which makes the security issues a critical concern in the wireless communicationsover them. Physical-layer security techniques, which are based on the Shannon’s unconditional secrecy model, are effective in addressing the security issue while meeting the required performance level. According to the Wyner’s wiretap channel model, to achieve unconditionally security communication, the first step is to build up a wiretap channel with better channel quality between the legitimate communication peers than that of the eavesdropper; and the second step is to employ a robust security code to ensure that the legitimate users experience negligible errors while the eavesdropper is subject to 0.5 error probability. \nMotivated by this idea, in this thesis, we build wiretap channels for the single antenna systems without resorting to the spatial degree in commonly observed the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. Firstly, to build effective wiretap channels, we design a novel scheme, called multi-round two-way communications (MRTWC). By taking feedback mechanisms into the design of Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes, our scheme adds randomness to the feedback signals from the destination to keep the eavesdropper ignorant while adding redundancy with the LDPC codes so that the legitimate receiver can correctly receive and decode the signals. Then, the channel BERs are specifically quantified according to the crossover probability in the case of Binary Symmetric Channel (BSC), or the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) in the case of AWGN and Rayleigh channels. Thus, the novel scheme can be utilized to address the security and reliability. Meanwhile, we develop a cross-layer approach to building the wiretap channel, which is suitable for high dynamic scenarios. By taking advantage of multiple parameters freedom in the discrete fractional Fourier transform (DFRFT) for single antenna systems, the proposed scheme introduces a distortion parameter instead of a general signal parameter for wireless networks based on DFRFT. The transmitter randomly flip-flops the uses of the distortion parameter and the general signal parameter to confuse the eavesdropper. An upper-layer cipher sequence will be employed to control the flip-flops. This cryptographic sequence in the higher layer is combined with the physical layer security scheme with random parameter fipping in DFRFT to guarantee security advantages over the main communication channel. \nAs the efforts on the second step, this thesis introduces a novel approach to generate security codes, which can be used for encoding with low complexity by taking advantage of a matrix general inverse algorithm. The novel constructions of the security codes are based on binary and non-binary resilient functions. With the proposed security codes, we prove that our novel security codes can ensure 0.5 error probability seen by the wiretapper while close to zero by the intended receiver if the error probability of the wiretapper’s channel is over a derived threshold. Therefore, the unconditionally secure communication of legitimate partners can be guaranteed. It has been proved mathematically that the non-binary security codes could achieve closer to the security capacity bound than any other reported short-length security codes under BSC. \nFinally, we develop the framework of associating the wiretap channel building approach with the security codes. The advantages between legitimate partners are extended via developing the security codes on top of our cross-layer DFRFT and feedback MRTWC security communication model. In this way, the proposed system could ensure almost zero information obtained by the eavesdroppers while still keeping rather lower error transmissions for legitimate users. Extensive experiments are carried out to verify the proposed security schemes and demonstrate the feasibility and implement ability. An USRP testbed is also constructed, under which the physical layer security mechanisms are implemented and tested. Our study shows that our proposed security schemes can be implemented in practical communications settings.