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Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference (APSIPA ASC)

A study on secure pilot signal design for OFDM systems

Kenta Umebayashi, F. Nakabayashi, Yasuo Suzuki

Published Dec 1, 2014• 6 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate a physical layer security technique in an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) based wireless communications. In an OFDM system, the legitimate transmitter (Alice) can increase secrecy capacity with proper power allocation and/or bit loading methods for example by maximizing mutual information for own communication, i.e. between Alice and the legitimate receiver (Bob). The reason of increasing secrecy capacity is that the power allocation is suitable for the channel state between Alice and Bob but not suitable for the channel state between Alice and the eavesdropper (Eve). In this paper, we investigate a new approach where dummy data is exploited to achieve further improvement of secrecy capacity. Specifically, real data and dummy data are implemented in transmit OFDM symbols and secure pilot signals are employed to inform the receiver about their respective locations. Two secure pilot signal designs are introduced and in both of them it is designed that Bob can easily detect correct real data locations but not for Eve. One of them uses fake pilot signals that cause Eve to mistakenly select dummy data as real data. Numerical results will show that secrecy capacity performance of the first secure pilot signal based secure communication (not using fake signal) is slightly less than the performance of water filling algorithm. One significant advantage of the first secure pilot signal based secure communication is that the computational cost should be significantly less than the water filling algorithm. In addition, we will show that fake pilot signal based secure communication can provide significant gain in secrecy capacity while the computational cost is still small.

DOI
10.1109/apsipa.2014.7041552

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In this paper, we investigate a physical layer security technique in an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) based wireless communications. In an OFDM system, the legitimate transmitter (Alice) can increase secrecy capacity with proper power allocation and/or bit loading methods for example by maximizing mutual information for own communication, i.e. between Alice and the legitimate receiver (Bob). The reason of increasing secrecy capacity is that the power allocation is suitable for the channel state between Alice and Bob but not suitable for the channel state between Alice and the eavesdropper (Eve). In this paper, we investigate a new approach where dummy data is exploited to achieve further improvement of secrecy capacity. Specifically, real data and dummy data are implemented in transmit OFDM symbols and secure pilot signals are employed to inform the receiver about their respective locations. Two secure pilot signal designs are introduced and in both of them it is designed that Bob can easily detect correct real data locations but not for Eve. One of them uses fake pilot signals that cause Eve to mistakenly select dummy data as real data. Numerical results will show that secrecy capacity performance of the first secure pilot signal based secure communication (not using fake signal) is slightly less than the performance of water filling algorithm. One significant advantage of the first secure pilot signal based secure communication is that the computational cost should be significantly less than the water filling algorithm. In addition, we will show that fake pilot signal based secure communication can provide significant gain in secrecy capacity while the computational cost is still small.
We present a secure transmission method for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signaling between legitimate nodes (Alice and Bob) communicating in time-division duplex (TDD) mode under an active attack. An active eavesdropper carries out pilot contamination attack in pilot phase by transmitting the pilot signal of the legitimate user and jamming attack in data phase. In the proposed method, Alice estimates the reciprocal channel between Alice and Bob by employing successive cancellation of the pilot contamination and interference from an active eavesdropper in pilot and data phases, respectively. We estimate reciprocal channels of legitimate users and eavesdropper. The precoder design at Alice from the estimated channels steers information towards Bob and artificial noise towards Eve in order to enhance the secrecy capacity of channel of the legitimate nodes. The simulation results show that the proposed method effectively estimates the channels of legitimate users and eavesdropper by removing the impact of contamination attack. Consequently, legitimate channel achieves higher secrecy capacity.
This paper considers the problem of physical layer security of a wireless orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) communication system. We first develop a transmit filter-aided secure OFDM system scheme which can disturb eavesdropper's receptions by destroying the orthogonality of OFDM signals at the eavesdropper, while the quality of legitimate transmission is maintained. Then, in an effort to further improve the security performance, we also propose an artificial noise (AN)-aided secure OFDM system associated with the transmit filter-aided approach. AN is generated in the null space of the legitimate channel by making use of residual power after power allocation for subcarriers. Therefore, AN can only disrupt eavesdropper's receptions but not affect legitimate receiver. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed transmit filter and AN-aided physical layer security designs in the OFDM wiretap system.
We investigate the physical layer security of wireless single-input single-output orthogonal-division multiplexing (OFDM) when a transmitter, which we refer to as Alice, sends her information to a receiver, which we refer to as Bob, in the presence of an eavesdropping node, Eve. To prevent information leakage, Alice sends an artificial-noise (AN) signal superimposed over her information signal. We investigate the impact of the channel delay spread, OFDM cyclic prefix, information/AN power allocation, and information and AN precoders design on the achievable average secrecy rate. We consider the two cases of known and unknown channel state information (CSI) at Alice. Furthermore, we compare both cases of per-sub-channel processing and joint sub-channels processing at Eve's receiver. Our numerical results show the gains of AN injection in terms of average secrecy rate for different OFDM operating conditions. Moreover, based on our new insights, we demonstrate that the AN-aided scheme is effective and achieves almost the same average secrecy rate as the full-CSI case without the need for Eve's instantaneous CSI at Alice.
In this work, novel physical layer security (PLS) schemes are proposed for orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) to secure both data and pilots in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The majority of previous studies focus on only securing the data without considering the security of the pilots used for channel estimation. However, the leakage of channel state information (CSI) from a legitimate node to an eavesdropper allows the latter to acquire knowledge about the channel of the legitimate nodes. To this end, we propose adaptive and flexible PLS algorithms which can 1) secure data, 2) secure pilots, and 3) jointly secure both data and pilots. Particularly, minimum-phase all-pass channel decomposition is exploited, where the proposed algorithms use the all-pass component to provide security without harming the performance of the legitimate user. In the analysis for data security, we evaluate the secrecy under correlated and uncorrelated eavesdropping channels via closed-form bit error rate (BER) formulas. For pilot security, we analyze the estimated channel’s normalized mean squared error (NMSE) performance. The simulation results and theoretical analysis demonstrate that the proposed algorithms can effectively enhance the communication secrecy of the overall system.
Broadcasting in wireless channels causes security vulnerabilities since both the intended receiver and the eavesdropper may receive the information. Physical layer security (PLS) ensures the confidentiality of information transmitted wireless medium, even in the presence of eavesdroppers, without relying on cryptographic techniques implemented at higher layers. A PLS method for cooperative relay based Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) with optimal relay selection and power optimization is proposed. In order to increase the overall system’s secrecy rate, a hybrid relaying and water filling based optimal power allocation is performed for multi-relay assisted OFDM-based wireless networks. By changing the eavesdroppers’ distances, the performance efficiency of the proposed system is verified. The analysis is carried out for both Full Duplex (FD) and Half Duplex (HD) systems and their performances are compared with existing equal power allocation technique. The proposed method combines relay selection and novel power optimization process to improve secrecy rate than the existing power allocation methods for both HD and FD systems.
One benefit of 5G network deployment relates to the smaller size of cells allowing low latency and increased users capacity. The downside is that the potential eavesdroppers could be closer to the victim making the security more challenging. So it is clear the need for enhanced privacy protection in the next generation communications systems even for low power/low complexity IoT devices. The last few years there are numerous research efforts to enhance transmitted information security with complementary techniques that operate in physical layer. In this paper we propose a physical layer scheme that complements the security schemes implemented in the upper layers or/and in the physical layer. The proposed scheme takes advantage of the pilot subcarriers that are part of an OFDM transmission. Pilot subcarriers are essential for the pilot channel estimation process performed at the receiver. In conventional OFDM systems the positions of pilot subcarriers are known. In this paper we propose the positions of the subcarriers to change on every OFDM symbol following a probability distribution known only to the legitimate transmitter and legitimate receiver. This puts a passive eavesdropper at a relative disadvantage compared to a legitimate receiver, because it does not know the position of the pilot subcarriers. To evaluate the security performance of the proposed scheme the secrecy capacity and the outage probability are used as metrics.