Secure communication over a half-duplex relay system in the presence of an external wiretapper is investigated. In such a scenario, conventional relaying protocols generally provide secrecy rates that converge to a finite constant in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. It is shown in this work that strictly superior performance can be achieved by allowing the destination to transfer random keys in the form of known interference to the relay insecurely over the wireless medium. When there is no direct link between the source and the destination, an amplify-and-forward (AF) protocol is shown to achieve a secrecy rate that scales as 1/2 log SNR, if each of the legitimate nodes has a single antenna only. However, in the presence of a direct link between source and destination, this scaling rule no longer applies. The bottleneck of the AF scheme in the presence of a direct source-destination link is identified, motivating the use of multiple antennas at the destination to almost surely guarantee a secure degree of freedom of one half over the channel. The results hold even if the eavesdropper has more antennas than the source and the relay combined.
Secure communication over a half-duplex relay system in the presence of an external wiretapper is investigated. In such a scenario, conventional relaying protocols generally provide secrecy rates that converge to a finite constant in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. It is shown in this work that strictly superior performance can be achieved by allowing the destination to transfer random keys in the form of known interference to the relay insecurely over the wireless medium. When there is no direct link between the source and the destination, an amplify-and-forward (AF) protocol is shown to achieve a secrecy rate that scales as 1/2 log SNR, if each of the legitimate nodes has a single antenna only. However, in the presence of a direct link between source and destination, this scaling rule no longer applies. The bottleneck of the AF scheme in the presence of a direct source-destination link is identified, motivating the use of multiple antennas at the destination to almost surely guarantee a secure degree of freedom of one half over the channel. The results hold even if the eavesdropper has more antennas than the source and the relay combined.
Secure communication protocols over a single-relay system in the presence of a multiple-antenna eavesdropper are investigated. When there is no direct link between the source and the destination, an amplify-and-forward (AF) protocol that allows both the destination and the source to jam the eavesdropper is shown to achieve secrecy rates that grow linearly with the transmit power in dB, even if all the legitimate nodes have strictly fewer antennas than the eavesdropper. The number of achievable secure degrees of freedom is quantified and shown to match an upper bound when the number of antennas at the destination is sufficiently large. However, in the presence of a direct link between source and destination, this scaling rule no longer applies. The bottleneck of the AF scheme in the presence of a direct source-destination link is identified, motivating the use of another AF scheme and a novel compress-and-forward protocol that can achieve a positive number of secure degrees of freedom using an insecure feedback link.
A multiple-antenna Gaussian wiretap channel in which the number of antennas at the source is not greater than that at the eavesdropper is considered. Without feedback, the secrecy capacity over such a channel generally converges to a constant at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). A half-duplex secure protocol allowing the destination to actively transfer random keys in the form of known interference is proposed. It is shown that using multiple antennas at the destination is instrumental in achieving a secrecy rate that grows linearly with logSNR. The pre-log factor of the secrecy rate, i.e., the number of secure degrees of freedom, is characterized, revealing an interesting interplay between the numbers of antennas at the three communication nodes. The relationship of the achievable secure degrees of freedom to those obtained in the case without feedback is finally discussed.
A multiple-antenna Gaussian wiretap channel in which the number of antennas at the source is not larger than that at the eavesdropper is considered. Without feedback, the secrecy capacity over such a channel generally converges to a constant at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). A half-duplex secure protocol allowing the destination to actively broadcast random keys over insecure channels is proposed. It is shown that using multiple antennas at the destination is instrumental in achieving a secrecy rate that grows linearly with log SNR. The pre-log factor of the secrecy rate, i.e. the secure degree of freedom, is characterized, revealing an interesting interplay between the numbers of antennas at the three communication nodes.
The problem of secure unicast communication over multihop wireless relay networks with directed links in the presence of an eavesdropper is considered. In the existing literature this problem has been considered in one or both of the following two scenarios: (A) relay nodes employ relaying schemes, such as Decode-and-Forward (DF), (B) the source communicates with the destination over a two-hop relay network. We argue that computationally complex relaying schemes such as DF render end-to-end performance characterization intractable, without providing any performance guarantee in general channel and network scenarios. Therefore, we consider one of the simplest relaying scheme: Amplify-and-Forward (AF) that allows us to provide guarantees on the optimal performance over a wide range of channel conditions. A node performing AF-relaying scales and forwards the signal received at its input. Further, with AF-relaying the end-to-end performance characterization problem remains tractable for much larger class of networks than those that can be considered with other relaying schemes. The key contribution of this work is twofold. We first provide the optimal vector of scaling factors that maximizes the achievable AF secrecy rate, no matter which relay the eavesdropper listens to. Further, we prove that in high-SNR regime, the optimal AF secrecy rate thus achieved is within a constant gap from the cutset upper bound on the secrecy capacity.
Wireless networks are susceptible to eavesdropping due to the inherent broadcast nature of the wireless medium. However, it is also this broadcast nature of wireless communications that allows cooperation among multiple users or relay nodes. Thus, it is unclear how cooperation and secrecy interacts, particularly in the scenario when each node in the network is equipped with multiple antennas (MIMO). In this paper, we consider the information theoretic secure transmission in a classical four node wiretap relay network, consisting of a source node, a destination node, and a relay node, in the presence of a fourth adversarial wiretapper node that can observe all transmissions from the source as well as the relay node. For a MIMO quasi-static fading channel model between every pair of nodes, we explore the importance of degrees of freedom in providing secure transmissions, through secrecy outage analysis in the high signal-to-noise ratio regime. We characterize the achievable diversity versus secure multiplexing gain tradeoff for decode-and-forward as well as compress-and-forward relaying, under the full-duplex constraint.
In this paper, we investigate the secrecy outage performance of decode-and-forward (DF) buffer-aided relaying networks with a multi-antenna destination in the presence of an eavesdropper. In order to take full advantage of the benefits provided by the multiple antennas at the destination and the available relays, we adopt the max-link relay selection scheme and propose a half-duplex and two full-duplex secure transmission schemes for secrecy improvement, i.e., 1) maximal-ratio combining (MRC), 2) maximal-ratio combining/cooperative jamming (MRC/CJ), and 3) zero-forcing beamforming/cooperative jamming (ZFB/CJ). For all proposed schemes, we present exact and asymptotic closed-form expressions of the secrecy outage probability by modeling the dynamic buffer state transitions as a Markov chain. Moreover, simple and informative asymptotic results are provided under both L → ∞ and L → ∞ scenarios (where L denotes the buffer size), from which we can obtain further insights on the secrecy diversity gain and the secrecy coding gain. The highlights of this paper can be summarized as follows: 1) Under L → ∞ scenario, the secrecy diversity gains of all proposed schemes both reach M. When L → ∞, the secrecy diversity gains of MRC, MRC/CJ and ZFB/CJ increase to M (1 + ND), MND and 2M respectively, where M is the number of relays and ND represents the number of antennas at the destination; 2) The secrecy coding gain of the system differs with different schemes, and it improves with the increase of M and ND under both the two scenarios; and 3) Under the scenario L → ∞, ZFB/CJ outperforms MRC and MRC/CJ across the entire signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) range of interest, however, when L→ ∞, ZFB/CJ outperforms MRC/CJ and MRC in the low SNR regime, while the opposite holds in the high SNR regime.