In this paper a physical layer security scheme is proposed for secret transmission of data between legitimate parties, Alice and Bob, in presence of an illegitimate receiver, Eve. It is assumed that there is no knowledge of Eve's channel state information, and Alice/Bob exploit common randomness of wireless environment to randomize data over independent subcarriers. Specifically, we consider concurrent transmission of secret/normal data over a set of independent subcarriers to meet the goal of achieving high uncertainty in information received by illegitimate party. It is first shown that this scheme provides perfect secrecy in information-theoretic sense. Next, a power allocation strategy is designed to maintain normal service with specified data rate requirement and minimum power. Alice and Bob then use the available power to opportunistically achieve the maximum possible secrecy rate. Satisfactory performance curves of this scheme is shown under different parameters (number of total subcarriers, data requirement of the normal service, and main channel average SNR level) using complementary cumulative distribution function of obtained secrecy rate. One goal in this work is to demonstrate how the price for secret communication is paid in terms of consumed power and occupied subcarriers when Alice/Bob has no knowledge of wiretap channel state information.
In this paper a physical layer security scheme is proposed for secret transmission of data between legitimate parties, Alice and Bob, in presence of an illegitimate receiver, Eve. It is assumed that there is no knowledge of Eve's channel state information, and Alice/Bob exploit common randomness of wireless environment to randomize data over independent subcarriers. Specifically, we consider concurrent transmission of secret/normal data over a set of independent subcarriers to meet the goal of achieving high uncertainty in information received by illegitimate party. It is first shown that this scheme provides perfect secrecy in information-theoretic sense. Next, a power allocation strategy is designed to maintain normal service with specified data rate requirement and minimum power. Alice and Bob then use the available power to opportunistically achieve the maximum possible secrecy rate. Satisfactory performance curves of this scheme is shown under different parameters (number of total subcarriers, data requirement of the normal service, and main channel average SNR level) using complementary cumulative distribution function of obtained secrecy rate. One goal in this work is to demonstrate how the price for secret communication is paid in terms of consumed power and occupied subcarriers when Alice/Bob has no knowledge of wiretap channel state information.
We investigate physical layer security in wireless communication networks, where a transmitter Alice sends a confidential message to an intended user Bob, while coexisting with a normal transmitter DT, a normal receiver DR, and a passive eavesdropper Eve. Compared with the conventional cooperative jamming (CJ) scheme, DT has dual responsibilities. One is to broadcast public information to its service subscriber DR, and the other is to confound the unauthorized eavesdropper Eve to ensure desired secure communication. Considering the secrecy outage restriction of Bob and the quality of service demand of DR, we propose an optimal resource management strategy. Users with different security requirements take hierarchical secure measures. For example, banking transaction needs to adopt high strength security measures, and personal voice communication resorts to low-level security protection strategies. Numerical simulations show that the proposed secure design outperforms the CJ scheme in terms of effective service rate and effective energy efficiency with a little secrecy rate loss, which is suitable for the low-level security real-time communication.
We consider a system where an agent (Alice) aims at transmitting a message to a second agent (Bob) over a set of parallel channels, while keeping it secret from a third agent (Eve) by using physical layer security techniques. We assume that Alice perfectly knows the set of channels with respect to Bob, but she has only a statistical knowledge of the channels with respect to Eve. We derive bounds on the achievable outage secrecy rates, by considering coding either within each channel or across all parallel channels. Transmit power is adapted to the channel conditions, with a constraint on the average power over the whole transmission. We also focus on the maximum cumulative outage secrecy rate that can be achieved. Moreover, in order to assess the performance in a real life scenario, we consider the use of practical error correcting codes. We extend the definitions of security gap and equivocation rate, previously applied to the single additive white Gaussian noise channel, to Rayleigh distributed parallel channels, on the basis of the error rate targets and the outage probability. Bounds on these metrics are also derived, considering the statistics of the parallel channels. Numerical results are provided, that confirm the feasibility of the considered physical layer security techniques.
Wireless systems are susceptible to eavesdropping as an unwelcome result of the broadcast nature of the wireless medium. Fortunately, the wireless medium also provides endowments including the temporal dispersion, the capability of signal superposition and other properties, to facilitate defending against eavesdropping. The focus of the thesis is to provide schemes for utilizing these properties at the physical layer and their performance analysis from an information-theoretic secrecy perspective. The work is based on Wyner's results on the wire-tap channel, in which the transmission between two legitimate users (Alice and Bob) is eavesdropped upon by Eve. The secrecy level is measured by the equivocation rate at Eve. The system performance is measured by the secrecy capacity. This is the maximum rate at which a message can be sent from Alice to Bob, while constraining the equivocation rate at Eve equal to the communication rate, and thus ensuring that Eve cannot deduce any useful information asymptotically. First, the scenario where a secret message needs to be delivered to the intended receiver within a given delay constraint and without the knowledge of the channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter is considered. In particular, hybrid automatic retransmission request (HARQ) protocols are revisited for a block-fading wire-tap channel via a joint consideration of channel coding, secrecy coding, and retransmission protocols. Two secure HARQ protocols: a repetition time diversity (RTD) scheme with maximal-ratio combining, and an incremental redundancy (INR) scheme based on ratecompatible Wyner secrecy codes are analyzed via an outage-based formulation. The throughput of RTD and INR protocols under probabilistic outage requirements is derived. Asymptotic analysis and numerical computations are given to demonstrate both the benefits of HARQ protocols and the tradeoff between reliability and confidentiality in delay-constrained communications. Second, the effects of interference on information-theoretic secret communication is considered. More specifically, the wiretap channel with a helping interferer (WT-HI) is proposed and studied. Here, an interferer, which does not know the confidential message, helps in ensuring the secrecy of the message by sending independent signals. Achievable secrecy rates and upper bounds on the secrecy capacity are given for both discrete memoryless and Gaussian channels. Interference has conventionally been regarded as a harmful phenomenon that leads to decreasing the rate and the reliability performance of wireless systems. In this work, it is shown that interference can be exploited to assist wireless secrecy. Lastly, the problem of secret key generation over fading channels, in which there exists an additional authenticated, public and error-free feedback channel from Bob to Alice, is considered. A key generation scheme consisting of a communication phase and a key-generation phase is presented. The communication phase is based on layered broadcast coding, which adapts the decoded rate at Bob to the actual channel state without requiring CSI available at Alice. The key-generation phase is based on the messages decoded by Bob after the communication phase and the public feedback. The achievable secrecy key rate and the optimal power distribution over coded layers for maximizing the secrecy key rate are characterized. Theoretical and numerical results show that the broadcast approach outperforms the single-level-coding based approach significantly, and hence demonstrate the role of introducing self-interference in facilitating secret-key generation over slowly fading channels when transmit CSI is not available.
A transmission between two agents, Alice and Bob, over a set of parallel sub-channels is overheard by a third agent Eve, through a second set of parallel sub-channels. All subchannels are flat with random and independent gains and additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). Alice splits the total amount of available power among the sub-channels, with the purpose of maximizing the communication rate to Bob, under reliability and secrecy constraints. To this end, two schemes are considered. In one case the secret message is encoded with a single wiretap code and then split among the sub-channels. In the latter case the secret message is first split into a number of sub-messages, each separately encoded and transmitted on a different sub-channel. The achievable secrecy rates under a constraint on the secrecy outage probability (SOP) are derived and closed form expressions for Rayleigh fading sub-channels are obtained. In order to limit the complexity of resources optimization (power and rates) we also consider suboptimal solutions based on the selection of active sub-channels over which power is split either equally or according to a waterfilling algorithm with respect to the Alice-Bob channel.
We consider a system where an agent (Alice) aims at transmitting a message to a second agent (Bob) over a set of parallel channels, while keeping it secret from a third agent (Eve) by using physical layer security techniques. We assume that Alice perfectly knows the set of channels with respect to Bob, but she has only a statistical knowledge of the channels with respect to Eve. We derive bounds on the achievable outage secrecy rates, by considering coding either within each channel or across all parallel channels. Transmit power is adapted to the channel conditions, with a constraint on the average power over the whole transmission. We also focus on the maximum cumulative outage secrecy rate that can be achieved. Moreover, in order to assess the performance in a real life scenario, we consider the use of practical error correcting codes. We extend the definitions of security gap and equivocation rate, previously applied to the single additive white Gaussian noise channel, to Rayleigh distributed parallel channels, on the basis of the error rate targets and the outage probability. Bounds on these metrics are also derived, taking into account the statistics of the parallel channels. Numerical results are provided, that confirm the feasibility of the considered physical layer security techniques.
Security has become an increasingly significant and urgent issue in wireless networks. The growing computational capability of the eavesdropper (Eve) and more and more complicated secure key management in large scale and heterogeneous networks, pose more and more stringent requirement to the cryptographic protocols. As a new design paradigm, physical layer security has been recognised as a promising solution to enhance the security of wireless links relying on the channel properties and advanced signal processing, and can act as either an alternative or a complementary solution to the conventional cryptographic methods. Without complicated secure key generation and management, physical layer security is quite suitable for the large scale distributed networks. In this thesis, we aim to improve the secrecy performance in emerging wireless communication systems relying on different physical layer security techniques. Firstly, the security of an amplify-and-forward successive relaying network with multiple untrusted relay nodes is investigated, where the conventional detrimental inter-relay interference is exploited to jam the untrusted nodes without assistance of external helpers. Considering different complexity requirements, several relay selection schemes are proposed, and the closed-form expressions of the lower bound of the secrecy outage probability and the maximum secrecy diversity order are derived accordingly. It is shown that the maximum secrecy diversity order of N-1 can be achieved for an N relay nodes network. Secondly, the artificial noise (AN) aided secure transmission strategy for a multiple-input single-output multiple-Eve (MISOME) system with a secure user (Bob) and a normal user (NU) is investigated. The power allocations among Bob, NU and AN, as well as the wiretap code rates, are jointly optimized to maximize the effective secrecy throughput (EST), under the average throughput constraint of NU. An alternative optimization algorithm with guaranteed convergence is proposed to obtain the optimal parameters. It is shown that the EST increases with the transmitting power and the number of transmit antennas, and decreases with the throughput constraint of NU, and the EST can be improved through injecting AN and concurrent transmission of Bob and NU. Thirdly, physical layer security in a multi-antenna small-cell network is investigated, where the multi-antenna base stations (BSs), cellular users, and Eves are all randomly distributed according to independent Poisson point processes. Stochastic geometry is applied to analyze the connection and secrecy outage probabilities and the average achievable secrecy rate. The impact of different parameters, including power allocation, BS and Eve density, and the adaptive eavesdropping or jamming on the secrecy performance is analyzed. It is shown that the average secrecy rate is a quasi-concave function of the power allocation factor and monotonically decreases with the ratio of the Eve-BS density. Finally, we study the physical layer security in a large-scale heterogeneous network consisting of both sub-6 GHz massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) macro cells and millimeter wave (mmWave) small cells. By considering pilot spoofing attacks from the Eves, the coverage and secrecy probabilities are derived using stochastic geometry and the conditions under which the millimeter wave tier outperforms the sub-6 GHz counterpart are discussed in terms of both coverage and secrecy.It is shown that the mmWave small cell can provide better coverage performance in the high transmission code-rate region, and the secrecy performance of the mmWave system outperforms the sub-6 GHz counterpart in the low redundant rate region, which reveals the advantage of using mmWave for secure communication.