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IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security

Physical-Layer Secrecy for OFDM Transmissions Over Fading Channels

Francesco Renna, Nicola Laurenti, H. Vincent Poor

Published Apr 20, 2012• 99 citations
Publisher

Abstract

This paper considers the information theoretic secrecy rates that are achievable by an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) transmitter/receiver pair in the presence of an eavesdropper that might either use an OFDM structure or choose a more complex receiver architecture. The analysis is made possible by modeling the system as a particular instance of a high dimensional multiple-input multiple-output wiretap channel. The secrecy capacity is formulated as a maximization problem under a trace constraint, and simple expressions are given for its high signal-to-noise (SNR) limit. The low rate limit of the secrecy outage probability is also evaluated under a fading channel model. As for the finite SNR case, the secrecy rates that can be achieved with particular inputs are considered. Numerical results are provided under a Rayleigh fading channel model and under dependence of the main and eavesdropper channels. The secrecy loss due to the OFDM structure constraints, and the information gain for an eavesdropper that uses a more complex receiver, are also considered.

DOI
10.1109/tifs.2012.2195491

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This paper considers the information theoretic secrecy rates that are achievable by an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) transmitter/receiver pair in the presence of an eavesdropper that might either use an OFDM structure or choose a more complex receiver architecture. The analysis is made possible by modeling the system as a particular instance of a high dimensional multiple-input multiple-output wiretap channel. The secrecy capacity is formulated as a maximization problem under a trace constraint, and simple expressions are given for its high signal-to-noise (SNR) limit. The low rate limit of the secrecy outage probability is also evaluated under a fading channel model. As for the finite SNR case, the secrecy rates that can be achieved with particular inputs are considered. Numerical results are provided under a Rayleigh fading channel model and under dependence of the main and eavesdropper channels. The secrecy loss due to the OFDM structure constraints, and the information gain for an eavesdropper that uses a more complex receiver, are also considered.
Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems have enjoyed widespread adoption in high data rate wired and wireless networks, due to their ability to efficiently cope with slowly varying dispersive channels. This paper considers the information theoretic secrecy rates that are achievable by an OFDM transmitter/receiver pair in the presence of an eavesdropper that might either use an OFDM structure or choose a more complex receiver architecture. The analysis is performed through modeling of the OFDM system with an eavesdropper as a special case of a high dimensional multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wiretap channel, which allows the secrecy loss due to the OFDM structure constraints, and the information gain for an eavesdropper that uses a more complex receiver to be quantified. The results are expressed in terms of both ergodic rates and outage probabilities for multipath Rayleigh fading channels, and in terms of dependence on the signal to noise ratio (SNR) ratio between the main and eavesdropper channels.
Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has been established as the preferred modulation choice for high-rate data transmission over dispersive channels, as it allows rejection of inter-symbol interference (ISI) and efficient utilization of the available spectrum. We address the issues of determining achievable secrecy rates and secrecy capacity for OFDM transmission in the presence of a generic eavesdropper. In doing so, we refrain from making the restrictive assumption made in previous works that the eavesdropper uses a standard fast Fourier transform (FFT)-based demodulator. First, the high SNR secrecy capacity under a total input power constraint is evaluated for both cyclic prefix and zero-padding suffix OFDM systems. It is shown that in both cases the result is sensibly lower than what we would get if the eavesdropper used an OFDM receiver. Then, optimal power allocation schemes are proposed for both types of OFDM systems and the secrecy rates are compared with results obtained by using existing power allocation methods described in the literature for parallel Gaussian wiretap channels and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) Gaussian wiretap channels.
Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems have enjoyed widespread adoption as the physical layer standard for high data rate wired and wireless networks, due to their ability to efficiently cope with slowly varying dispersive channels. Therefore in searching for feasible implementations of physical layer security techniques, it is appropriate to analyze how existing information theoretic results can be applied to the OFDM structure This paper considers the information theoretic secrecy rates that are achievable in a wiretap OFDM channel when transmitting quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) constellation symbols. The loss with respect to the secrecy rates obtained with Gaussian distributed inputs is evaluated for both nite constellation cardinalities and in the asymptotic approximation of arbitrarily high cardinality. Moving from the insight gained with this analysis, we propose bit-loading strategies to efficiently allocate the appropriate number of bits in each subchannel, by considering the twofold objective of minimizing the loss with respect to the Gaussian input secrecy capacity and minimizing the total bit load.
We study the secrecy capacity of fast fading channels under imperfect main channel (between the transmitter and the legitimate receiver) estimation at the transmitter. Lower and upper bounds on the ergodic secrecy capacity are derived for a class of independent identically distributed (i.i.d.) fading channels. The achievable rate follows from a standard wiretap code in which a simple on-off power control is employed along with a Gaussian input. The upper bound is obtained using an appropriate correlation scheme of the main and eavesdropper channels and is the best known upper bound so far. The upper and lower bounds coincide with recently derived ones in case of perfect main CSI. Furthermore, the upper bound is tight in case of no main CSI, where the secrecy capacity is equal to zero. Asymptotic analysis at high and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is also given. At high SNR, we show that the capacity is bounded by providing upper and lower bounds that depend on the channel estimation error. At low SNR, however, we prove that the secrecy capacity is asymptotically equal to the capacity of the main channel as if there were no secrecy constraint. Numerical results are provided for i.i.d. Rayleigh fading channels.
We consider the transmission of confidential data over wireless channels with multiple communicating parties. Based on an information-theoretic problem formulation in which two legitimate partners communicate over a quasi-static fading channel and an eavesdropper observes their transmissions through another independent quasi-static fading channel, we define the secrecy capacity in terms of outage probability and provide a complete characterization of the maximum transmission rate at which the eavesdropper is unable to decode any information. In sharp contrast with known results for Gaussian wiretap channels (without feedback), our contribution shows that in the presence of fading information-theoretic security is achievable even when the eavesdropper has a better average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) than the legitimate receiver - fading thus turns out to be a friend and not a foe.
The amount of sensitive data, which is transmitted wirelessly will increase with future technologies. This raises many questions about secure data transmission. Besides cryptography, information-theoretic security gained increasing attention over the recent years. Among others, it deals with the problem of secure data transmission on the physical layer to a legitimate receiver (Bob) in the presence of an eavesdropper (Eve). In this work, we investigate upper and lower bounds on the secrecy outage probability for slowly-fading wiretap channels with an arbitrary dependency structure between the fading channels to Bob and Eve. Both cases of absence of channel-state information at the transmitter (CSI-T) and availability of CSI-T of only the main channel to the legitimate receiver are considered. Furthermore, we derive explicit expressions for the upper and lower bounds for Rayleigh fading and compare them to the case of independent channels. The joint distribution of the legitimate and eavesdropper channels has a tremendous impact on the achievable secrecy outage probability. The bounds enable developing guaranteed secrecy schemes by only measuring the marginal channel distributions.