Chapter 7 Cooperative Secrecy in Wireless Communications

Şennur Ulukuş, Ersen Ekrem

Emad S. Hassan

Due to the broadcast nature of wireless communications, it is difficult to shield transmitted signals from adversarial users in the coverage area of the transmission. This chapter highlights many issues concerned with achieving secrecy in the physical layer. It discusses overview of the foundations dating back to the pioneering key-based Shannon and keyless Wyner–Ziv works on information-theoretic security. In 1978, Leung-Yang-Cheong and Hellman considered the Gaussian wiretap channel. The chapter introduces multiformity of cooperative jamming techniques to show the effectiveness of jamming signals transmitted by some legitimate transmitters in a network of multiple transmitters and receivers in achieving physical layer security for a certain legitimate pair. It gives the idea of employing cooperative jammers in a multiple trusted/untrusted relay networks in order to improve security, and the interactions arising between cooperation and secrecy in the presence of untrusted relays are adopted. A resurgence of interest in aspects of secrecy at the physical layer has been experienced.

Etienne Perron, Suhas N. Diggavi, Emre Telatar

Given that wireless communication occurs in a shared and inherently broadcast medium, the transmissions are vulnerable to undesired eavesdropping. This occurs even when a point-to-point communication is sought, and hence a fundamental question is whether we can utilize the wireless channel properties to establish secrecy. In this paper we consider secret communication between two special nodes ("source" and "destination") in a wireless network with authenticated relays: the message communicated to the destination is to be kept information-theoretically (unconditionally) secret from any eavesdropper within a class. Since the transmissions are broadcast and interfere with each other, complex signal interactions occur. We develop cooperative schemes which utilize these interactions in wireless communication over networks with arbitrary topology, and give provable unconditional secrecy guarantees.

Zhiguo Ding, M Xu, Kanapathippillai Cuma +1 more

Ruolin Zhang

This chapter investigates the secrecy-energy trade-offs for communication in wireless networks. It is shown that privacy requirements for applications such as image or video transmissions do not require perfect secrecy, and the level of privacy can be quantified using a Rate-Distortion metric. Using information theoretic analysis, the chapter formulates analytic secrecy trade-offs for various communication channel models. In particular we analyze the advantage of partial secrecy for the Gaussian and Rayleigh fading channel models and the MIMO channel. The impact of secrecy requirements and the inherent secrecy-energy-connectivity trade-offs are also analyzed for networks of wireless nodes.

Ali Ekşım, Tolga Demirci