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Achieving Secret Communication for

Li Zang, Roy D. Yates, Wade K. Trappe

Published Jan 1, 2010• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

We consider a secret communication scenario where Alice wants to transmit secretly to Bob in presence of a passive eavesdropper Eve. The Alice-Bob channel is a fixed-SNR AWGN channel, while the Alice-Eve channel is a fast Rayleigh fading channel, with the channel states only known to Eve. Alice knows the statistics of Alice-Eve channel, but not the exact realizations. We investigate the achievable secrecy rates for this channel model with Gaussian signaling and discrete signaling. For Gaussian signaling, several transmission strategies according to the main channel's relative channel gain are proposed and evaluated. For discrete signaling, achievable secrecy rates with Quadrature Am- plitude Modulation (QAM) are evaluated. When Bob's channel is much better than Eve's channel, simple Gaussian signaling can perform close to the upper bound, and is better than the rate achieved with M-QAM. When Bob's channel gain is on average worse than the eavesdropper's average channel gain, positive secrecy rate can still be achieved for Gaussian signaling with artificial noise injection and a burst signaling strategy. Moreover, M-QAM can outperform Gaussian signaling. The key factor that enables secret communication in this case is that both M-QAM and artificial noise limit the leakage of information when Eve's channel is unusually good.

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We consider a secret communication scenario where Alice wants to transmit secretly to Bob in presence of a passive eavesdropper Eve. The Alice-Bob channel is a fixed-SNR AWGN channel, while the Alice-Eve channel is a fast Rayleigh fading channel, with the channel states only known to Eve. Alice knows the statistics of Alice-Eve channel, but not the exact realizations. We investigate the achievable secrecy rates for this channel model with Gaussian signaling and discrete signaling. For Gaussian signaling, several transmission strategies according to the main channel's relative channel gain are proposed and evaluated. For discrete signaling, achievable secrecy rates with Quadrature Am- plitude Modulation (QAM) are evaluated. When Bob's channel is much better than Eve's channel, simple Gaussian signaling can perform close to the upper bound, and is better than the rate achieved with M-QAM. When Bob's channel gain is on average worse than the eavesdropper's average channel gain, positive secrecy rate can still be achieved for Gaussian signaling with artificial noise injection and a burst signaling strategy. Moreover, M-QAM can outperform Gaussian signaling. The key factor that enables secret communication in this case is that both M-QAM and artificial noise limit the leakage of information when Eve's channel is unusually good.
We consider a secret communication scenario where Alice wants to transmit secretly to Bob in presence of a passive eavesdropper Eve. The Alice-Bob channel is a fixed-SNR AWGN channel, while the Alice-Eve channel is a fast Rayleigh fading channel, with the channel states only known to Eve. Alice knows the statistics of Alice-Eve channel, but not the exact realizations. We investigate the achievable secrecy rates for this channel model with Gaussian signaling and discrete signaling. For Gaussian signaling, several transmission strategies according to the main channel's relative channel gain are proposed and evaluated. For discrete signaling, achievable secrecy rates with Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) are evaluated. When Bob's channel is much better than Eve's channel, simple Gaussian signaling can perform close to the upper bound, and is better than the rate achieved with M-QAM. When Bob's channel gain is on average worse than the eavesdropper's average channel gain, positive secrecy rate can still be achieved for Gaussian signaling with artificial noise injection and a burst signaling strategy. Moreover, M-QAM can outperform Gaussian signaling. The key factor that enables secret communication in this case is that both M-QAM and artificial noise limit the leakage of information when Eve's channel is unusually good.
We investigate the achievable secrecy rate with Gaussian random codes when the main channel is an AWGN channel, while the eavesdropper's channel is Rayleigh fading with additive Gaussian noise. Several transmission strategies according to the main channel's relative channel gain are proposed and evaluated. We show that even if the main channel channel gain is arbitrarily worse than the eavesdropper's average channel gain, positive secrecy rate can still be achieved with artificial noise injection and a burst signaling strategy.
This thesis examines the challenges of information-theoretic secret communication that exploits the temporal and spatial variations of the wireless medium to improve secret communication rates. We first examine the secrecy capacity of a system consisting of independent parallel channels with one transmitter, one intended receiver and one eavesdropper. We show that the secrecy capacity of the system is the sum of the secrecy capacities of the individual subchannels. We further derive the optimal power allocation strategy for a system of parallel AWGN channels subject to a total power constraint, and also extend the results to random fading channels with additive Gaussian noise. We then study the achievable secrecy rate with Gaussian random codes for the situation where the channel of the intended receiver is a constant AWGN channel, while the eavesdropper's channel is fast Rayleigh fading with unknown realizations but known statistics to the transmitter. The proposed method with artificial noise and bursting provides ways to achieve positive secrecy rate even when Bob's channel is worse than Eve's channel on average. We also examine the achievable secrecy rate for a multiple antenna system, and the optimal input structure needed to achieve this rate. For the multiple input single output case, an analytical solution is derived. Multiple antenna systems provide extra degrees of freedom to the transmitter so that a beamforming-like approach can be used to provide advantage to the intended receiver against the eavesdropper. Next we derive a secrecy capacity outer bound region for a class of one-sided interference channels. The outer bound is shown to be tight for a class of binary deterministic one-sided interference channels, and can be achieved within one bit for some Gaussian one-sided interference channels.Finally, as Gaussian random codes are impractical, we evaluate achievable secrecy rates with discrete signaling. We observe that with discrete signaling, there exists an optimal power that maximizes the achievable secrecy rate. For the AWGN channel, larger constellation is always better. While for fading channel, the optimal constellation size varies with the power constraint, and discrete signaling can perform better than random Gaussian coding.
Secure communication over a wireless channel in the presence of a passive eavesdropper is considered. Our main interest is in the disadvantaged wireless environment, where the channel from the transmitter Alice to the eavesdropper Eve is (possibly much) better than that from Alice to Bob, hence making information-theoretic secrecy challenging. We present a method to exploit inherent vulnerabilities of the eavesdropper's receiver through the use of “cheap” cryptographically-secure key-bits, which only need be kept secret from Eve for the (short) transmission period of the message, to obtain information-theoretic (i.e. everlasting) secret bits at Bob. In particular, based on an ephemeral cryptographic key pre-shared between Alice and Bob, a random jamming signal with large variations is added to each symbol. The legitimate receiver Bob uses the key to subtract the jamming signal immediately, while Eve is forced to perform the inherently nonlinear operation of recording the signal; when Eve then obtains the key, which we assume pessimistically (for Alice) happens right after message transmission, Eve can then immediately subtract the jamming signal from the recorded signal. But, because of the intervening non-linear operation in Eve's receiver and the non-commutativity of nonlinear operations, Bob's channel and Eve's channel have different achievable rates and information-theoretic secrecy can be obtained, hence achieving the goal of converting the vulnerable cryptographic secret key into information-theoretic secure bits. The achievable secrecy rates for different settings are evaluated. Among other results, it is shown that, even when the eavesdropper has perfect access to the output of the transmitter (albeit through an imperfect analog-to-digital converter), the method can still achieve a positive secrecy rate.
We consider a wiretap multiple-input multiple-output multiple-eavesdropper (MIMOME) channel, where agent Alice aims at transmitting a secret message to agent Bob, while leaking no information on it to an eavesdropper agent Eve. We assume that Alice has more antennas than both Bob and Eve, and that she has only statistical knowledge of the channel towards Eve. We focus on the low-noise regime, and assess the secrecy rates that are achievable when the secret message determines the distribution of a multivariate Gaussian mixture model (GMM) from which a realization is generated and transmitted over the channel. In particular, we show that if Eve has fewer antennas than Bob, secret transmission is always possible at low-noise. Moreover, we show that in the low-noise limit the secrecy capacity of our scheme coincides with its unconstrained capacity, by providing a class of covariance matrices that allow to attain such limit without the need of wiretap coding.
Consider a wireless transmission from Alice to Bob in the presence of an eavesdropper, Eve. We propose a technique to allow Alice to send a message such that Bob can decode it but Eve can get little information about the message. This scenario is a classic example of the wiretap channel, for which several researchers have begun to develop practical schemes. However, we consider a challenging version in which the channel from Alice to Eve may be as good or better than the channel from Alice to Bob. There have been no practical secrecy coding techniques that have been developed for this scenario. The key to allow secret communication in such a scenario is feedback from Bob to Alice (which Eve can also observe). The scheme we develop uses reliability-based hybrid automatic-repeat-request (RB-HARQ) over a fast fading channel to provide a decoding advantage at Bob. Bob requests information about received symbols that suffer from deep fades. The retransmitted symbols improve Bobpsilas ability to decode the message faster than at Eve, who sees retransmission of bits with random reliabilities. We evaluate the proposed scheme by performance measures such as the probability of successful decoding and the equivocation rate at Eve.