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 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.
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.
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.
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.
The growth of wireless networks has been considerable over the last decades. Due to the broadcast nature of these networks, security issues have taken a critical role in today’s communications. A promising direction towards achieving secure communications is information theoretic secrecy, which is an approach exploiting the randomness of the channels to ensure secrecy. Based on this approach, there has been a recent surge of interest in a potential cooperation between users to enhance the secrecy of communications. In this thesis we investigate the interaction between cooperation and secrecy. In particular the contributions of the thesis can be divided into two parts. In the first part, we study cooperative strategies for secrecy for wireless channels. Our goal is to evaluate the effect of fading and limited CSI on the eavesdropper’s channels. In that purpose we consider a scenario where a helper aims at increasing the secrecy of the communication between a source and destination in the presence of an eavesdropper. Several strategies are discussed for the helper, namely decode-and-forward, amplify-and-forward, and cooperative jamming. We introduce the secrecy outage probability, the conditional secrecy outage probability and the secure throughput as secrecy measures. For each measure, we investigate and compare the secrecy performance of cooperation. We furthermore elaborate a system optimization in terms of strategy selection, node positioning, power allocation and rate design. In the second part, we consider cooperation in the 4-node scenario against a more sophisticated adversary: an active eavesdropper, which can either passively eavesdrop, or jam the transmission. A game-theoretic perspective is a natural way to analyze the competitive interaction between the helper and the eavesdropper. Therefore we define several secrecy games, for which we find the Nash and Stackelberg equilibria as well as the corresponding secrecy rate outcomes. Another important consideration in this scenario is the interaction between the source and the helper, which we model and solve as a Stackelberg game, and we illustrate its impact on the achievable secrecy rates.
In this chapter, we investigate the problem of physical-layer security in wireless networks with cooperative relays. In Sections 11.2 and 11.3, we study the notion of deaf cooperation to reinforce security of transmission in wireless relay networks. We distinguish between two main approaches to deaf cooperation, namely, the cooperative jamming (CJ) approach and the noise forwarding (NF) approach. In a CJ scheme, a helping interferer transmits Gaussian noise when it can hurt the eavesdropper more than it can hurt the legitimate receiver, and hence improves the achievable secure information rate. The idea of introducing artificial noise in a Gaussian wiretap channel by a helper node was introduced in References 5-7. In relay networks with secrecy constraints, the role of CJ was further investigated, e.g., in References 8-10. References 11-13 proposed CJ strategies for multiple-antenna relay networks. On the other hand, in the NF scheme which was introduced in Reference 14, the relay node sends a dummy (context-free) codeword drawn at random from a codebook that is known to both the legitimate receiver and the eavesdropper to introduce helpful interference that would hurt the eavesdropper more than the legitimate receiver.