Information-Theoretic Security in Wireless Systems

Tasos Dagiuklas, Theofilos Chrysikos, Stavros A. Kotsopoulos

Kanchan Rahul Jamnik

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are used for a wide range of things these days, from watching the environment to improving healthcare systems. But because these networks are used everywhere, they are also open to security risks like spying, data corruption, and node capture. It is very important to address these issues in order to protect the accuracy, privacy, and access of data being sent. Information-theoretic security looks like a good way to deal with these problems because it uses mathematical models to make sure that transmission in WSNs is safe and uses little energy. This essay goes into detail about information-theoretic security in WSNs. It gives a full rundown of the mathematical basics and real-world implications for getting strong security in places with limited resources. The idea of "secrecy capacity" is at the heart of this method. It measures the highest rate at which authorized nodes can communicate privately while preventing spying foes. Utilizing the chance that exists in wireless channels, encrypted keys can be generated without using shared secrets, making them resistant to attempts that try to steal them. Because sensor nodes only have a short power life, energy economy is very important in WSNs. Information-theoretic security methods, like physical layer security and joint communication, are designed to use as little energy as possible while still providing strong security. Nodes can work together to improve signal strength and fight channel fading using cooperative methods. This makes the network last longer without compromising security. This article also talks about the trade-offs between security, energy savings, and communication performance in WSNs. This helps us figure out how to make the best transfer schemes.

Kaoru Kurosawa

Azadeh Sheikholeslami, Dennis Goeckel, Hossein Pishro-Nik

Information-theoretic security guarantees that a message is kept secret from potential eavesdroppers regardless of their current or future computational abilities. But current information-theoretic security approaches generally rely on an advantage of the channel of the desired recipient over the adversary, and such an advantage can be difficult to guarantee in a wireless network where an eavesdropper might be very near the transmitter. This paper initiates an approach to everlasting security for wireless communication links by exploiting a fundamental concept from systems theory: that nonlinear systems are not (necessarily) commutative. This property is exploited by employing a short-term cryptographic key to force the eavesdropper's signal to be subjected to nonlinear operations in the reverse order of that of the signal at the desired recipient. After introducing the idea and providing analysis for the general case, we next consider a simple (and practical) instantiation where the transmitter uses the ephemeral cryptographic key to rapidly power modulate the transmitted signal. Secrecy rates with this rapid power modulation under various assumptions establish the promise of the approach, even in the case of an eavesdropper with uniformly better conditions (channel and receiver quality) than the intended recipient.

Aylin Yener, Şennur Ulukuş

Physical-layer security utilizes resources of the transmission medium to guarantee secure communication against an adversary with unlimited computational power. Rooted in information theory, physical-layer security advocates for a foundational approach by requiring security of communicated information as well as its reliability at the outset. The past decade has seen an unprecedented effort in physical-layer security research resulting in promising new design insights. The majority of these advances has been in wireless communications security, well-motivated by the fact that most data at large, including those of sensitive nature, flow over wireless links that are more vulnerable to security breaches, e.g., eavesdropping. At the same time, the open broadcast nature of wireless brings possibilities of cooperation by the network entities for improving security, e.g., resistance to eavesdropping. This article aims to provide an overview of research results in information-theoretic security with multiple wireless transmitters, and focuses on distilling insights for designing wireless systems with confidentiality guarantees.