Unlike passive eavesdropping, proactive eavesdropping is recently proposed to use jamming to moderate a suspicious link's communication rate for facilitating simultaneous eavesdropping. This paper advances the proactive eavesdropping research by considering a practical half-duplex mode for the legitimate monitor (e.g., a government agency) and dealing with the challenging case that the suspicious link opportunistically communicates over parallel fading channels. To increase eavesdropping success probability, we propose cognitive jamming for the monitor to change the suspicious link's long-term belief on the parallel channels' distributions and thereby induce it to transmit more likely over a smaller subset of unjammed channels with a lower transmission rate. As the half-duplex monitor cannot eavesdrop the channel that it is simultaneously jamming to, our jamming design should also control the probability of such “own goal” that occurs when the suspicious link chooses one of the jammed (uneavesdroppable) channels to transmit. We formulate the optimal jamming design problem as a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) and show that it is non-convex. Nevertheless, we prove that the monitor should optimally use the maximum jamming power if it decides to jam, for maximally reducing the suspicious link's communication rate and driving the suspicious link out of the jammed channels. Then we manage to simplify the MINLP to integer programming and reveal a fundamental trade-off in deciding the number of jammed channels: jamming more channels helps reduce the suspicious link's communication rate for overhearing more clearly but increases own goal probability and thus decreases eavesdropping success probability. Finally, we extend our study to the two-way suspicious communication scenario and show that there is another interesting trade-off in deciding the common jammed channels for balancing bidirectional eavesdropping performances. Numerical results show that our optimized jamming-assisted eavesdropping schemes greatly increase eavesdropping success probability as compared with the conventional passive eavesdropping.
Unlike passive eavesdropping, proactive eavesdropping is recently proposed to use jamming to moderate a suspicious link's communication rate for facilitating simultaneous eavesdropping. This paper advances the proactive eavesdropping research by considering a practical half-duplex mode for the legitimate monitor (e.g., a government agency) and dealing with the challenging case that the suspicious link opportunistically communicates over parallel fading channels. To increase eavesdropping success probability, we propose cognitive jamming for the monitor to change the suspicious link's long-term belief on the parallel channels' distributions and thereby induce it to transmit more likely over a smaller subset of unjammed channels with a lower transmission rate. As the half-duplex monitor cannot eavesdrop the channel that it is simultaneously jamming to, our jamming design should also control the probability of such “own goal” that occurs when the suspicious link chooses one of the jammed (uneavesdroppable) channels to transmit. We formulate the optimal jamming design problem as a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) and show that it is non-convex. Nevertheless, we prove that the monitor should optimally use the maximum jamming power if it decides to jam, for maximally reducing the suspicious link's communication rate and driving the suspicious link out of the jammed channels. Then we manage to simplify the MINLP to integer programming and reveal a fundamental trade-off in deciding the number of jammed channels: jamming more channels helps reduce the suspicious link's communication rate for overhearing more clearly but increases own goal probability and thus decreases eavesdropping success probability. Finally, we extend our study to the two-way suspicious communication scenario and show that there is another interesting trade-off in deciding the common jammed channels for balancing bidirectional eavesdropping performances. Numerical results show that our optimized jamming-assisted eavesdropping schemes greatly increase eavesdropping success probability as compared with the conventional passive eavesdropping.
There is a growing need for government agencies to monitor suspicious communication links to prevent crimes and terror attacks. In this paper, we study a legitimate surveillance scenario where a legitimate monitor aims to intercept the suspicious communication between a transmitter and a receiver over fading channels. The legitimate monitor can eavesdrop (decode) the information of the suspicious link only when its achievable data rate is no smaller than that at the suspicious receiver. In practice, the legitimate eavesdropping is challenging, especially when the legitimate monitor is far from the suspicious transmitter. To overcome this issue, we propose a new approach, namely proactive eavesdropping via cognitive jamming, in which the legitimate monitor purposely jams the receiver and changes the suspicious communication (e.g., to a smaller data rate) in order to overhear easily. In particular, we consider delay-sensitive and delay-insensitive applications for the suspicious transmission, under which the legitimate monitor maximizes the eavesdropping non-outage probability and the relative eavesdropping rate, respectively, by optimizing its jamming power allocation over different fading states subject to an average power constraint. We present efficient algorithms for optimally solving the formulated problems. Numerical results show that thanks to the cognitive jamming, the proposed proactive eavesdropping scheme greatly outperforms the conventional passive eavesdropping without jamming.
To enhance the national security, there is a growing need for government agencies to legitimately monitor suspicious communication links for preventing intended crimes and terror attacks. In this paper, we propose a new wireless information surveillance paradigm by investigating a scenario where a legitimate monitor aims to intercept a suspicious wireless communication link over fading channels. The legitimate monitor can successfully eavesdrop (decode) the information of the suspicious link at each fading state only when its achievable data rate is no smaller than that at the suspicious receiver. In practice, such legitimate eavesdropping is particularly challenging, since the legitimate monitor may be far away from the suspicious transmitter and cannot eavesdrop efficiently. To overcome this issue, we propose a new approach, namely proactive eavesdropping via cognitive jamming, in which the legitimate monitor purposely jams the receiver so as to change the suspicious communication (e.g., to a smaller data rate) for overhearing more efficiently. In particular, we consider delay-sensitive and delay-tolerant applications for the suspicious data communications, under which the legitimate monitor maximizes the eavesdropping non-outage probability for event-based monitoring and the relative eavesdropping rate for content analysis, respectively, by optimizing its jamming power allocation over different fading states subject to an average power constraint. Numerical results show that the proposed proactive eavesdropping via cognitive jamming approach greatly outperforms the conventional passive eavesdropping without jamming and the proactive eavesdropping with constant-power jamming.
To enhance the national security, there is a growing need for authorized parties to legitimately monitor suspicious communication links for preventing intended crimes and terror attacks. In this paper, we propose a new wireless information surveillance paradigm by investigating a scenario, where a legitimate monitor aims to intercept a suspicious wireless link over fading channels. The legitimate monitor can successfully eavesdrop (decode) the information of the suspicious link at each fading state only when its achievable data rate is no smaller than that at the suspicious receiver. We propose a new approach, namely, proactive eavesdropping via cognitive jamming, in which the legitimate monitor purposely jams the receiver in a full-duplex mode so as to change the suspicious communication (e.g., to a smaller data rate) for overhearing more efficiently. By assuming perfect self-interference cancelation (SIC) and global channel state information (CSI) at the legitimate monitor, we characterize the fundamental information-theoretic limits of proactive eavesdropping. We consider both delay-sensitive and delay-tolerant applications for the suspicious communication, under which the legitimate monitor maximizes the eavesdropping non-outage probability (for event-based monitoring) and the relative eavesdropping rate (for content analysis), respectively, by optimizing the jamming power allocation over different fading states subject to an average power constraint. Numerical results show that the proposed proactive eavesdropping via cognitive jamming approach greatly outperforms other benchmark schemes. Furthermore, by extending to a more practical scenario with residual SI and local CSI, we design an efficient online cognitive jamming scheme inspired by the optimal cognitive jamming with perfect SIC and global CSI.
This letter proposes a paradigm shift in wireless security from preventing conventional eavesdropping attacks to a new legitimate surveillance objective by studying how a legitimate monitor (e.g., a government agency) efficiently eavesdrops a suspicious wireless communication link. The suspicious transmitter controls its communication rate over Rayleigh fading channels to maintain a target outage probability at the receiver, and the legitimate monitor can successfully eavesdrop only when its achievable rate is no smaller than the suspicious communication rate. We propose proactive eavesdropping via a jamming approach to maximize the average eavesdropping rate, where the legitimate monitor sends jamming signals with optimized power control to moderate the suspicious communication rate.
Proactive eavesdropping improves the wireless information surveillance performance by cognitively sending jamming signals to degrade the suspicious link condition. Current studies all considered that the suspicious users do not apply jamming to defend against the proactive eavesdropping. Contrary to that, this paper considers that a jammer sends jamming signals to degrade the eavesdropping link condition to protect the suspicious communications. A Stackelberg game framework is formulated to track the interactions between the jammer and the monitor and make strategy designs, where the monitor is the leader aiming at maximizing the successful eavesdropping probability and the jammer is the follower aiming at minimizing the successful eavesdropping probability. For the follower’s problem, the optimal jammer’s jamming power allocation policy with respect to the fixed monitor’s jamming power is derived based on the sum-of-ratios optimization. Then for the leader’s problem, the optimal monitor’s jamming power allocation policy is obtained via the bisection search method and the sum-of-ratios optimization. Some design insights are discussed from the obtained policies. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is verified by simulation results. It is shown that the jamming from the jammer deteriorates the eavesdropping performance and the proposed scheme outperforms various benchmark schemes in existing literature.
This letter studies the proactive eavesdropping with one half-duplex legitimate monitor (E) over the wireless-powered multichannel suspicious system, where the suspicious transmitter (ST) proceeds energy harvesting from the power beacon and then communicates with the suspicious destination (SD) via N parallel channels. Under this setup, one jamming-assisted eavesdropping scheme is proposed to maximize the ergodic eavesdropping rate at E. Specifically, we first fix the number of jamming channels K at E, and then reveal that E should jam with maximum power over these K channels to force the ST to allocate more power over the other N - K channels, so as to maximally increase the perceived power at E over the corresponding N - K channels. Armed with this, to maximize the ergodic rate, the following work is only to find the optimal K with simple search. Moreover, one closed-form sub-optimal K is derived for practical implementation. Results present the great gain achieved by the proposed scheme compared to conventional passive eavesdropping and the effectiveness of the sub-optimal K.