A MIMO-OFDM PHY Integrated (MOPI) scheme is proposed to provide confidentiality against eavesdroppers in wireless networks. The proposed MOPI scheme prevents any eavesdropper from learning the channel state information (CSI) of the wiretap channel and decoding the information being exchanged. This is achieved by the use of channel sounding combined with a novel physical-layer network coding (PNC) scheme such that the eavesdropper, due to lack of CSI, will suffer from very poor decoding performance. The security of the proposed MOPI scheme is verified by computer simulation. The simulation results show that confidentiality is guaranteed as long as the eavesdropper's channel realization is independent of the legal receiver's, which is usually the case in a typical wireless network.
A MIMO-OFDM PHY Integrated (MOPI) scheme is proposed to provide confidentiality against eavesdroppers in wireless networks. The proposed MOPI scheme prevents any eavesdropper from learning the channel state information (CSI) of the wiretap channel and decoding the information being exchanged. This is achieved by the use of channel sounding combined with a novel physical-layer network coding (PNC) scheme such that the eavesdropper, due to lack of CSI, will suffer from very poor decoding performance. The security of the proposed MOPI scheme is verified by computer simulation. The simulation results show that confidentiality is guaranteed as long as the eavesdropper's channel realization is independent of the legal receiver's, which is usually the case in a typical wireless network.
In the literature, J.-P. Cheng et al. have proposed the MIMO-OFDM PHY integrated (MOPI) scheme for achieving physical-layer security in practice without using any cryptographic ciphers. The MOPI scheme uses channel sounding and physical-layer network coding (PNC) to prevent eavesdroppers from learning the channel state information (CSI). Nevertheless, due to the use of multiple antennas for PNC at transmitter and beamforming at receiver, it is not possible to have spatial multiplexing nor use space-time codes in our previous MOPI scheme. In this paper, we propose a variant of the MOPI scheme, called P-MOPI, that works with a cryptographic cipher and utilizes precoding matrix index (PMI) as an efficient key-exchange mechanism. With channel sounding, the PMI is only known between the transmitter and the legal receiver. The shared key can then be used, e.g., as the seed to generate pseudo random bit sequences for securing subsequent transmissions using a stream cipher. By applying the same techniques at independent subcarriers of the OFDM system, the P-MOPI scheme easily allows two communicating parties to exchange over 100 secret bits. As a result, not only secure communication but also the MIMO gain can be guaranteed by using the P-MOPI scheme.
In physical-layer security, secret bits are extracted from wireless channels. With the assumption of channel reciprocity, the legitimate users share the same channel which is independent of the channels between the legitimate users and the eavesdropper, leading to secure transmissions. However, practical implementation of the physical layer security faces many challenges. First, for the correlated channel such as the multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) channel, the security is decreased due to the correlation between the generated secret bits. Second, the nearby eavesdropper posts a security threat due to observing the same channel as the legitimate user's. Third, the eavesdroppers might try to reconstruct the wireless environments. In this paper, we propose two practical physical layer security schemes for the MIMO orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) systems: the precoding matrix index (PMI)-based secret key generation with rotation matrix (MOPRO) and the channel quantization-based (MOCHA) scheme. The former utilizes PMI and rotated reference signals to prevent the eavesdroppers from learning the secret key information and the latter applies channel quantization in order to extract more secret key bits. It is shown that not only the secure communication but also the MIMO gain can be guaranteed by using the proposed schemes.
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.
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.
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.
Many physical-layer security works in the literature rely on purely theoretical work or simulated results to establish the value of physical-layer security in securing communications. We consider the secrecy capacity of a wireless Gaussian wiretap channel using channel sounding measurements to analyze the potential for secure communication in a real-world scenario. A multi-input, multi-output, multi-eavesdropper (MIMOME) system is deployed using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) over an 802.11n wireless network. Channel state information (CSI) measurements were taken in an indoor environment to analyze time-varying scenarios and spatial variations. It is shown that secrecy capacity is highly affected by environmental changes, such as foot traffic, network congestion, and propagation characteristics of the physical environment. We also present a numerical method for calculating MIMOME secrecy capacity in general and comment on the use of OFDM with regard to calculating secrecy capacity.