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International Conference on Advanced Technologies for Communications

Wireless physical-layer security: The challenges ahead

Marco Di Renzo, Merouane Abdelkader Debbah

Published Oct 1, 2009• 22 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The issues of privacy and security in wireless communication networks have taken on an increasingly important role as these networks continue to flourish worldwide. Traditionally, security is viewed as an independent feature addressed above the physical-layer and all widely used cryptographic protocols are designed and implemented assuming the physical-layer has already been established and provides an error free link. However, with the emergence of ad-hoc and decentralized networks, higher-layer techniques, such as encryption, are complex and hard to be implemented. Therefore, there has been a recent attention on studying the fundamental ability of the physical-layer to provide secure wireless communications. In this contribution, we discuss the challenges ahead in implementing wireless physical-layer security.

DOI
10.1109/atc.2009.5349370

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The issues of privacy and security in wireless communication networks have taken on an increasingly important role as these networks continue to flourish worldwide. Traditionally, security is viewed as an independent feature addressed above the physical-layer and all widely used cryptographic protocols are designed and implemented assuming the physical-layer has already been established and provides an error free link. However, with the emergence of ad-hoc and decentralized networks, higher-layer techniques, such as encryption, are complex and hard to be implemented. Therefore, there has been a recent attention on studying the fundamental ability of the physical-layer to provide secure wireless communications. In this contribution, we discuss the challenges ahead in implementing wireless physical-layer security.
Security in wireless networks has traditionally been considered to be an issue to be addressed separately from the physical radio transmission aspects of wireless systems. However, with the emergence of new networking architectures that are not amenable to traditional methods of secure communication such as data encryption, there has been an increase in interest in the potential of the physical properties of the radio channel itself to provide communications security. Information theory provides a natural framework for the study of this issue, and there has been considerable recent research devoted to using this framework to develop a greater understanding of the fundamental ability of the so-called physical layer to provide security in wireless networks. Moreover, this approach is also suggestive in many cases of coding techniques that can approach fundamental limits in practice and of techniques for other security tasks such as authentication. This paper provides an overview of these developments.
The ongoing paradigm shift from classical centralized wireless technologies toward distributed large-scale networks such as the Internet of Things has introduced new security challenges that cannot be fully handled via traditional cryptographic means. In emerging wireless environments, devices have limited capabilities and are not controlled by a central control center; thus, the implementation of computationally expensive cryptographic techniques can be challenging. Motivated by this paradigm shift, substantial recent research has been investigating the use of the physical layer as a means to develop low-complexity and effective wireless security mechanisms. Such techniques are grouped under the umbrella of physical layer security. These techniques range from information-theoretic security, which exploits channel advantages to thwart eavesdropping, to physical layer fi ngerprinting techniques that exploit physical layer features for device identifi cation. In this context, providing state-of-the-art tutorials on the various approaches to physical layer security is of considerable interest. This Feature Topic gathers together tutorial-style and survey articles that provide an in-depth overview of the broad spectrum of security opportunities brought forward by physical layer security.
As wireless networking has a wide range of applications, its security is an issue of concern. Encryption is traditionally the main route to secure communications. Nevertheless, this security solution may be difficult to implement in some modern wireless networks, e.g., ad hoc and radio-frequency identification (RFID) networks which require large-scale organization and low computational complexity, respectively. An alternative approach is physical-layer security, which leverages the physical properties of radio channels to achieve reliable data transmission without the need of secret keys. Since this kind of security emerged from the information theoretical characterization of secrecy, there has been great interest in secrecy capacity of various wireless channels. This paper provides an overview of such capacity for a single user.
The ongoing paradigm shift from classical centralized wireless technologies toward distributed large-scale networks such as the Internet of Things has introduced new security challenges that cannot be fully handled via traditional cryptgraphic means. In such emerging wireless environments, devices have limited capabilities and are not controlled by a central control center; thus, the implementation of computationally expensive cryptographic techniques can be challenging. Motivated by these considerations, substantial recent research has been investigating the use of the physical layer as a means to develop low-complexity and effective wireless security mechanisms. Such techniques are grouped under the umbrella ofphysical layer security. These techniques range from information-theoretic security, which exploits channel advantages to thwart eavesdropping, to physical layer fingerprinting techniques that exploit physical layer features for device identification. In this context, providing state-of-the-art tutorials on the various approaches to physical layer security is of considerable interest. This Feature Topic gathers together such tutorial-style and overview articles that provide an in-depth overview of the broad spectrum of security opportunities brought forward by physical layer security.
Physical layer security (PHY-security) takes the advantages of channel randomness nature of transmission media to achieve communication confidentiality and authentication. Wiretap coding and signal processing technologies are expected to play vital roles in this new security mechanism. PHY-security has attracted a lot of attention due to its unique features and the fact that our daily life relies heavily on wireless communications for sensitive and private information transmissions. Compared to conventional cryptography that works to ensure all involved entities to load proper and authenticated cryptographic information, PHY-security technologies perform security functions without considering about how those security protocols are executed. In other words, it does not require to implement any extra security schemes or algorithms on other layers above the physical layer. This survey introduces the fundamental theories of PHY-security, covering confidentiality and authentication, and provides an overview on the state-of-the-art works on PHY-security technologies that can provide secure communications in wireless systems, along with the discussions on challenges and their proposed solutions. Furthermore, at the end of this paper, the open issues are identified as our future research directions.
Security issues for traditional wireless networks have been considered as a very important research area, and have taken a considerable attention for several years due to the broadcast nature of the wireless medium, which makes attacks more likely to happen than in wireline systems. Most of the studies in this area focus on the security in the higher layers in the protocol stack via the use of cryptography and key management. The main idea of these security approaches is based on the limited computational power of the eavesdroppers. With the advent of the infrastructureless networks such as mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), further challenges have appeared which make the nodes more vulnerable to attacks. Among these challenges are the absence of centralized hardware for security problems, the multihop routes that the transmitted information should follow, and the power-limited terminals [152]. Therefore, to cope with these limitations, physical layer security (or informationtheoretic security) has gained a considerable attention in the last few years. The goal of physical layer security is to allow the source to confidentially communicate with the legitimate destination, while the eavesdropper cannot interpret the source information, without any assumption for the eavesdropper nodes such as the computational power, or the available information. From an information-theoretic standpoint, the achieved source-destination confidential rate is called the achievable secrecy rate.