The wireless medium offers many opportunities for broadcast communications. However, it also opens the possibility for attackers to eavesdrop the broadcast data or to pretend to be another node or device. These two attacks define the protection goals, namely, confidentiality and authenticity. Traditionally, both are solved by cryptographic approaches exploiting knowledge available in the surrounding infrastructure. The novel communication paradigms for the Internet of Things or cyber-physical systems do not scale with the standard cryptographic approach. Instead it is possible to exploit properties of the underlying physical channel to provide countermeasures against eavesdropping and impersonation attacks. Thereby, the random fading channel induces uncertainty which is detrimental but at the same time also helpful. In this paper, we review and describe a generalized model for physical-layer-based confidential data transmission and wireless authentication. A key role is played by the channel uncertainty and available design dimensions such as time, frequency, and space. We show that wireless authentication and secret-key generation can work in multicarrier and multiple-antenna systems and explain how even outdated channel state information can help to increase the available secure degrees of freedom. This survey focuses on the system design of wireless physical-layer confidentiality and authenticity under channel uncertainty. The insights could lead to a design of practical systems which are preparing the ground for confidentiality and authenticity already on the physical layer of the communication protocol stack.
The wireless medium offers many opportunities for broadcast communications. However, it also opens the possibility for attackers to eavesdrop the broadcast data or to pretend to be another node or device. These two attacks define the protection goals, namely, confidentiality and authenticity. Traditionally, both are solved by cryptographic approaches exploiting knowledge available in the surrounding infrastructure. The novel communication paradigms for the Internet of Things or cyber-physical systems do not scale with the standard cryptographic approach. Instead it is possible to exploit properties of the underlying physical channel to provide countermeasures against eavesdropping and impersonation attacks. Thereby, the random fading channel induces uncertainty which is detrimental but at the same time also helpful. In this paper, we review and describe a generalized model for physical-layer-based confidential data transmission and wireless authentication. A key role is played by the channel uncertainty and available design dimensions such as time, frequency, and space. We show that wireless authentication and secret-key generation can work in multicarrier and multiple-antenna systems and explain how even outdated channel state information can help to increase the available secure degrees of freedom. This survey focuses on the system design of wireless physical-layer confidentiality and authenticity under channel uncertainty. The insights could lead to a design of practical systems which are preparing the ground for confidentiality and authenticity already on the physical layer of the communication protocol stack.
This paper provides a comprehensive review of the domain of physical layer security in multiuser wireless networks. The essential premise of physical layer security is to enable the exchange of confidential messages over a wireless medium in the presence of unauthorized eavesdroppers, without relying on higher-layer encryption. This can be achieved primarily in two ways: without the need for a secret key by intelligently designing transmit coding strategies, or by exploiting the wireless communication medium to develop secret keys over public channels. The survey begins with an overview of the foundations dating back to the pioneering work of Shannon and Wyner on information-theoretic security. We then describe the evolution of secure transmission strategies from point-to-point channels to multiple-antenna systems, followed by generalizations to multiuser broadcast, multiple-access, interference, and relay networks. Secret-key generation and establishment protocols based on physical layer mechanisms are subsequently covered. Approaches for secrecy based on channel coding design are then examined, along with a description of inter-disciplinary approaches based on game theory and stochastic geometry. The associated problem of physical layer message authentication is also briefly introduced. The survey concludes with observations on potential research directions in this area.
Due to the broadcast nature of wireless channels, wireless communication is vulnerable to eavesdropping, message modification, and node impersonation. Securing the wireless communication requires the shared secret keys between the communicating entities. Traditional security schemes rely on public key infrastructures and cryptographic algorithms to manage secret keys. Recently, many physical-layer-based methods have been proposed as alternative solutions for key generation in wireless networks. These methods exploit the inherent randomness of the wireless fading channel to generate secret keys while providing information-theoretical security without intensive cryptographic computations. This article provides an overview of the existing PHY-based key generation schemes exploiting the randomness of the wireless channels. Specifically, we first introduce the fundamental and general framework of the PHY-based key generation schemes and then categorize them into two classes: received-signal-strength-based and channel- phase-based protocols. Finally, we present a performance comparison of them in terms of key disagreement probability, key generation rate, key bit randomness, scalability, and implementation issues.
Recent years have been marked by an enormous growth of wireless communication networks and an extensive use of wireless applications. In return, this phenomenal expansion induced more concerns about the privacy and the security of the users. Physical layer security is one of the most promising solutions that were proposed to enhance the security of next generation wireless systems. The fundamental idea behind this technique is to exploit the randomness and the fluctuations of the wireless channel to achieve security without conditional assumptions on the computational capabilities of the eavesdropper. In fact, while these elements have traditionally been associated with signal deterioration, physical layer security uses them to ensure the confidentiality of the users. Nevertheless, these technical virtues rely heavily on perhaps idealistic channel state information assumptions. In that regard, the aim of this thesis is to look at the physical layer security paradigm from the channel uncertainty perspective. In particular, we discuss the ergodic secrecy capacity of different wiretap channels when the transmitter is hampered by the imperfect knowledge of the channel state information (CSI). We consider two prevalent causes of uncertainty for the CSI at transmitter (CSIT); either an error of estimation occurs at the transmitter and he can only base his coding and the transmission strategies on a noisy version of the CSI, or the CSI feedback link has a limited capacity and the legitimate receivers can only inform the transmitter about the quantized CSI. We investigate both the single-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wiretap channel and the multi-user broadcast wiretap channel. In the latter scenario, we distinguish between two situations: multiple messages transmission and common message transmission. We also discuss the broadcast channel with confidential messages (BCCM) where the transmitter has one common message to be transmitted to two users and one secret message intended to only one of them. In all cases, we show that by appropriately designing the coding and the transmission schemes, a secure communication can still be achieved even with an imperfect knowledge of the CSIT.
The goal of physical layer security (PLS) is to make use of the properties of the physical layer, including the wireless communication medium and the transceiver hardware, to enable critical aspects of secure communications. In particular, PLS can be employed to provide i) node authentication, ii) message authentication, and, iii) message confidentiality. Unlike the corresponding classical cryptographic approaches which are all based on computational security, PLS's added strength is that it is based on information theoretic security, in which no limitation with respect to the opponent's computational power is assumed and is therefore inherently quantum resistant. In this survey, we review the aforementioned fundamental aspects of PLS, starting with node authentication, moving to the information theoretic characterization of message integrity, and finally, discussing message confidentiality both in the secret key generation from shared randomness and from the wiretap channel point of view. The aim of this review is to provide a comprehensive roadmap on important relevant results by the authors and other contributors and discuss open issues on the applicability of PLS in sixth generation systems.
In virtually all communication systems, the issues of authentication, confidentiality, and privacy are handled in the upper layers of the protocol stack using variations of private-key and public-key cryptosystems. These cryptosystems are usually based upon mathematical operations, such as the factorization into prime factors, believed hard to perform for an attacker with limited computational power; hence, we refer to the security provided by these systems as computational security. While computational security has a clear trackrecord of proven effectiveness, it may be difficult to implement in some emerging network architectures. For example, the advent of wireless networks has fostered the development of mobile adhoc networks comprised of many devices with heterogenous capabilities; the wide range of computing power available in the devices makes it difficult to deploy a public-key infrastructure. In contrast with the established practice of computational security, many results from information theory, signal processing, and cryptography suggest that there is much security to be gained by accounting for the imperfections of the physical layer when designing secure systems. For instance, while noise and fading are usually treated as impairments in wireless communications, information-theoretic results show that they can be harnessed to “hide” messages from a potential eavesdropper or authenticate devices, without requiring a shared secret key. Such results, if they can be implemented in a costefficient way without sacrificing much data rate, call for the design of security solutions at the physical layer itself to complement computational security mechanisms.
The concept of physical layer security builds on the pivotal idea of turning the channel's imperfections, such as noise and fading, into a source of security. This is established through appropriately designed coding techniques and signal processing strategies. In this vein, it has been shown that fading channels can enhance the transmission of confidential information and that a secure communication can be achieved even when the channel to the eavesdropper is better than the main channel. However, to fully benefit from what fading has to offer, the knowledge of the channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) is of primordial importance. In practical wireless communication systems, CSIT is usually obtained, prior to data transmission, through CSI feedback sent by the receivers. The channel links over which this feedback information is sent can be either noisy, rate-limited, or delayed, leading to CSIT uncertainty. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of recent and ongoing research works on physical layer security with CSIT uncertainty. We focus on both information theoretic and signal processing approaches to the topic when the uncertainty concerns the channel to the wiretapper or the channel to the legitimate receiver. Moreover, we present a classification of the research works based on the considered channel uncertainty. Mainly, we distinguish between the cases when the uncertainty comes from an estimation error of the CSIT, from a CSI feedback link with limited capacity, or from an outdated CSI.