It is well known that a non-zero secrecy capacity of the wiretap channel is only possible when the legitimate receiver is less noisy than the wiretapper. This work shows that user cooperation is an efficient solution to this limitation. In particular, the four-terminal wiretap relay channel is considered in our work where several cooperation strategies, that enable secure communication, are constructed and the corresponding rate-equivocation regions are characterized. Of particular interest is the novel noise forwarding strategy which establishes the deaf helper phenomenon. Here, the relay is able to facilitate secure communication over the main channel while being totally ignorant of the transmitted message. The gain offered by the proposed strategies is proved theoretically and validated numerically in the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. Overall, our work establishes the utility of user cooperation in facilitating secure communication over wireless channels.
It is well known that a non-zero secrecy capacity of the wiretap channel is only possible when the legitimate receiver is less noisy than the wiretapper. This work shows that user cooperation is an efficient solution to this limitation. In particular, the four-terminal wiretap relay channel is considered in our work where several cooperation strategies, that enable secure communication, are constructed and the corresponding rate-equivocation regions are characterized. Of particular interest is the novel noise forwarding strategy which establishes the deaf helper phenomenon. Here, the relay is able to facilitate secure communication over the main channel while being totally ignorant of the transmitted message. The gain offered by the proposed strategies is proved theoretically and validated numerically in the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. Overall, our work establishes the utility of user cooperation in facilitating secure communication over wireless channels.
This paper investigates the role of user cooperation in facilitating secure wireless communications. In particular, the four-terminal relay-eavesdropper channel is introduced and analyzed. Several cooperation strategies are devised and the corresponding achievable rate-equivocation region are characterized. Of particular interest is the novel Noise-Forwarding (NF) strategy, where the relay node sends codewords independent of the source message to confuse the eavesdropper. This strategy is used to illustrate the deaf helper phenomenon, where the relay is able to facilitate secure communications while being totally ignorant of the transmitted messages. Furthermore, NF is shown to increase the perfect secrecy rate in the reversely degraded scenario, where the relay node fails to offer performance gains in the classical setting. The gain offered by the proposed cooperation strategies is then proved theoretically and validated numerically in the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel.
This paper establishes the utility of user cooperation in facilitating secure wireless communications. In particular, the four-terminal relay–eavesdropper channel is introduced and an outer-bound on the optimal rate-equivocation region is derived. Several cooperation strategies are then devised and the corresponding achievable rate-equivocation region are characterized. Of particular interest is the novel noise-forwarding (NF) strategy, where the relay node sends codewords independent of the source message to confuse the eavesdropper. This strategy is used to illustrate the deaf helper phenomenon, where the relay is able to facilitate secure communications while being totally ignorant of the transmitted messages. Furthermore, NF is shown to increase the secrecy capacity in the reversely degraded scenario, where the relay node fails to offer performance gains in the classical setting. The gain offered by the proposed cooperation strategies is then proved theoretically and validated numerically in the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel.
The study of the physical layer has offered a new perspective to the problem of communication security. This led to the development of a vast set of ideas and techniques rooted in information theory which can be employed in practice to provide unbreakable security. The information-theoretic approach relies mainly on the physical nature of the communication medium. In a wireless medium, the unique features of the wireless communication channel, such as its fading and broadcast nature, can be exploited to achieve higher secure information rates. In this dissertation, we study the secure transmission problem in wireless channels from an information-theoretic perspective. We first consider the fading multiple access wiretap channel. We give two new achievable schemes that use the time-varying (fading) nature of the channel to align the interference from different users at the eavesdropper perfectly in a one-dimensional space while creating a higher-dimensional space for the interfering signals at the legitimate receiver hence allowing for better chance of recovery. While we achieve this alignment through signal scaling at the transmitters in our first scheme (scaling based alignment), we let nature provide this alignment through the ergodicity of the channel coefficients in the second scheme (ergodic secret alignment). For each scheme, we show that the achievable secrecy rates scale logarithmically with the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Next, we study the security gains that can be achieved in a wireless network by employing cooperation among the nodes which is possible due to the broadcast nature of the wireless channel. We investigate the role of passive (also known as deaf) cooperation in improving the achievable secrecy rates in a Gaussian multiple relay network with an external eavesdropper. We distinguish between two modes of deaf cooperation, namely, cooperative jamming (CJ) and noise forwarding (NF). We derive the conditions in which each mode of deaf cooperation achieves secrecy rates that are higher than the secrecy capacity of the original Gaussian wiretap channel. As a result, we show that a deaf helper cannot be a useful cooperative jammer and noise forwarder at the same time. We derive the optimal power control policy for each mode. We consider the deaf helper selection problem where a fixed-size set of deaf helpers (possibly operating in different modes) are to be selected from the set of available relays so that the achievable secrecy rate is maximized. We propose a simple and efficient suboptimal strategy for selection which is shown to be optimal when only one helper is selected. Furthermore, we study the role of a multi-antenna deaf helper. Unlike the single antenna case, we show that, in general, it is useful to split the helper's power between cooperative jamming and noise forwarding. Hence, we propose a deaf cooperation strategy for this model and derive its optimal power control policy. We also show, for specific class of relay-eavesdropper channels, that a simple cooperative jamming strategy yields a secrecy rate that approaches the secrecy capacity as the helper's power is increased. Finally, we consider the role of active cooperation for secrecy in the multiple relay networks. We propose several relaying strategies for secure communication and derive the achievable secrecy rate for each strategy. In our strategies the relays decode the source signal and then forward it to the destination either in a single-hop or a multi-hop fashion. Each relay scales its transmitted signal in a way that ensures that signal components from different relays are canceled out at the eavesdropper.
In this paper, we investigate the roles of cooperative jamming (CJ) and noise forwarding (NF) in improving the achievable secrecy rates of a Gaussian wiretap channel (GWT). In particular, we study the role of a deaf helper in confusing the eavesdropper in a GWT channel by either transmitting white Gaussian noise (cooperative jamming) or by transmitting a dummy codeword of no context yet drawn from a codebook known to both the destination and the eavesdropper (noise forwarding). We first derive the conditions under which each mode of deaf cooperation improves over the secrecy capacity of the original wiretap channel and show that a helping node can be either a useful cooperative jammer or a useful noise forwarder but not both at the same time. Secondly, we derive the optimal power allocation for both the source and the helping node to be used in each of the two modes of deaf helping. Thirdly, we consider the deaf helper selection problem where there areNrelays present in the system and it is required to select the bestKdeaf helpers,K≥ 1, that yield the maximum possible achievable secrecy rate. For the case ofK=1, we give the optimal selection strategy with optimal power allocation. The computational complexity of the optimal selection strategy whenK> 1 is relatively large, especially for large values ofKandN. Thus, we propose a suboptimal strategy for the selection problem whenK> 1. We derive the complexity of the proposed selection strategies and show that, forK> 1, our suboptimal strategy, which works in a greedy fashion, enjoys a significantly less computational complexity than the optimal strategy. Nevertheless, as demonstrated by numerical examples, our suboptimal strategy gives rise to reasonable performance gains in terms of the achievable secrecy rate with respect to the case ofK=1.
In this paper, we investigate the roles of cooperative jamming (CJ) and noise forwarding (NF) in improving the achievable secrecy rates of a Gaussian wiretap channel (GWT). In particular, we study the role of a deaf helper in confusing the eavesdropper in a GWT channel by either transmitting white Gaussian noise (cooperative jamming) or by transmitting a dummy codeword of no context yet drawn from a codebook known to both the destination and the eavesdropper (noise forwarding). We first study the conditions in which each mode of deaf cooperation improves over the secrecy capacity of the original wiretap channel. Secondly, we derive the optimal power allocation for both the source and the helping node to be used in each of the two modes of deaf helping. Thirdly, we consider the deaf helper selection problem where there are N relays present in the system and it is required to select the best K deaf helpers, K ≥ 1, that yield the maximum possible achievable secrecy rate with deaf cooperation using K relays. First, we give an optimal strategy for the case of K = 1, i.e., for the selection of a single deaf helper. We propose a suboptimal strategy for selection in the general case where K >; 1. We discuss the complexity of each of the two strategies. Finally, we verify the performance of the proposed strategies through numerical examples.
This paper investigates the secure transmission in multiple access wiretap channels, where multiple legitimate users transmit private information to an intended receiver in the presence of multiple eavesdroppers. In order to improve security, we propose a novel cooperative jamming scheme, in which users do not share channel state information (CSI) but the legitimate channels will not be degraded by the artificial noise. The basic idea is to make each user exploit its own CSI in two slots to design artificial noise, so that the intended receiver can eliminate all the artificial noise but the eavesdroppers cannot. In this process, the interference between users plays a key role to achieve security, because it guarantees that the artificial noise from different users helps each other. We consider the non-collusion and collusion of eavesdroppers and analyze the secrecy performance for both scenarios. We adopt the secrecy sum-rate as the main metric, and show that positive secrecy sum-rate can be achieved by using the proposed scheme. Especially, we observe that when eavesdroppers collude and their additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) close to zero, the number of users must not be less than twice the number of eavesdroppers to ensure positive secrecy sum-rate. Finally, simulation results are provided to corroborate our theoretical findings.