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IEEE Communications Letters

Securing Two-Way Cooperative Systems With an Untrusted Relay: A Constellation-Rotation Aided Approach

Hongbin Xu, Li Sun, Pinyi Ren, Qinghe Du

Published Sep 16, 2015• 29 citations
Publisher

Abstract

This letter studies the secure transmission protocol design for two-way cooperative systems, where two terminal users communicate via an untrusted relay. The relay acts as both a helper and a potential eavesdropper, from which the users' messages need to be kept secret. A constellation-rotation aided approach is proposed to prevent the relay from decoding these messages. By rotating the signal constellation with a proper angle, the complex-valued symbol can be fully represented by its real component. Then, either user utilizes only one dimension of the signal to deliver its information, with the other dimension carrying the artificial noise (AN). In this manner, the received signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) at the relay is degraded due to the injection of AN, thereby increasing the difficulty of eavesdropping. Moreover, the desired signal and the AN lie in different directions at the terminal users, which makes the signal detection free-of-interference. The approximate expression for the upper bound of the users' symbol error rate (SER) is derived based on which a criterion is developed to choose the rotation angle that can optimize the system SER performance. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of our scheme compared to the competing candidates.

DOI
10.1109/lcomm.2015.2479231

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This letter studies the secure transmission protocol design for two-way cooperative systems, where two terminal users communicate via an untrusted relay. The relay acts as both a helper and a potential eavesdropper, from which the users' messages need to be kept secret. A constellation-rotation aided approach is proposed to prevent the relay from decoding these messages. By rotating the signal constellation with a proper angle, the complex-valued symbol can be fully represented by its real component. Then, either user utilizes only one dimension of the signal to deliver its information, with the other dimension carrying the artificial noise (AN). In this manner, the received signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) at the relay is degraded due to the injection of AN, thereby increasing the difficulty of eavesdropping. Moreover, the desired signal and the AN lie in different directions at the terminal users, which makes the signal detection free-of-interference. The approximate expression for the upper bound of the users' symbol error rate (SER) is derived based on which a criterion is developed to choose the rotation angle that can optimize the system SER performance. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of our scheme compared to the competing candidates.
This paper proposes a constellation overlapping scheme to secure two-way untrusted relaying systems, where the relay acts as both a helper facilitating data transmission and an eavesdropper intercepting users' messages. A truncated-channel-inversion based approach is developed to make the signals transmitted from two users experience the same equivalent channel, thereby realizing full constellation overlapping at the relay. Consequently, it is extremely difficult for the relay to recover the users' individual signals, and data confidentiality is thus protected. The achieved error floor level at the untrusted relay is analyzed, and the truncation thresholds are optimized to maximize the sum rate for end-to-end information exchange. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of our scheme in terms of security and transmission efficiency compared with the existing alternatives.
This paper studies the secure information exchange of two-way relaying systems, where two terminal users communicate bi-directionally with the assistance of an untrusted relay. Each user is assumed to have two messages with distinct priorities: high priority and low priority. The high-priority messages (HPM) are first transmitted, for which we propose a constellation overlapping scheme such that the received signals at the relay overlap with each other and a high error floor is created to prevent the untrusted relay from deciphering the information. Upon the completion of HPM exchange, each user sends its low-priority message (LPM) by superposing it onto the previously decoded HPM from the other user. By exploiting the difference between the error patterns for HPM at the terminal users and the relay, channel noises in various time slots can be aggregated at the relay to secure the LPM transmission. The symbol error probability (SEP) at the terminal users as well as the untrusted relay is analyzed, from which it is shown that HPM is guaranteed to have greater reliability and higher secrecy level than that of LPM. However, the transmission of LPM enjoys lower implementation complexity and reduced system overhead, which fully demonstrates that the message-prioritization-based unequal secrecy protection framework can realize a good performance-complexity tradeoff. Simulation results exhibit the superiority of the proposed design compared to the existing competing solutions.
This paper proposes a novel technique called constellation overlapping to secure two-way untrusted relaying systems. We first consider the symmetric case where two terminal users adopt the same modulation type. For this case, a truncated-channel-inversion-based approach is developed to make the signals from different users experience the same equivalent channel, thereby realizing full constellation overlapping at the relay. Consequently, an error floor is created at the untrusted relay, and data confidentiality is protected. Then, the asymmetric case is investigated, where different modulations are employed at the two users and the constellation overlapping cannot be realized. To address this issue, we develop a constellation virtualization method, which exploits the intrinsic user-cooperation mechanism to “virtualize” two identical constellations at the two users. In this manner, the constellation overlapping effect can still be achieved, without sacrificing much reliability performance. We optimize the truncation threshold to maximize the sum rate for end-to-end information exchange, and design the bit-to-symbol mapping criterion and the signal detection method as well. Unlike the existing physical layer security approaches that guarantee secrecy with additional resource consumptions, this method realizes security enhancement by letting different users mutually encrypt their signals over the air, which is more resource-efficient.
Untrusted bidirectional relay systems confront both internal and external eavesdropping problems, but existing studies generally focus on only one of them. This letter proposes a new scheme combining constellation superposition and artificial noise to resist both. First, we exploit constellation superposition to cause aliasing of the constellations at the untrusted relay to prevent its decoding. Then, we embed carefully designed artificial noise in the transmitted signal, making it difficult for an external eavesdropper to remove. Theoretical analysis and simulations verify that the proposed scheme maintains a high bit error rate for the untrusted relay while ensuring a lower bound of bit error rate for the external eavesdropper. In contrast, the bit error rate of the legitimate users decreases as the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the transmitter increases.
In this paper, we investigate a security transmission scheme at the physical layer for cooperative wireless relay networks in the presence of a passive eavesdropper.While the security scheme has been previously investigated with perfect channel state information(CSI) in the presence of a passive eavesdropper, this paper focuses on researching the robust cooperative relay beamforming mechanism for wireless relay networks which makes use of artificial noise (AN) to confuse the eavesdropper and increase its uncertainty about the source message.The transmit power used for AN is maximized to degrade the signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) level at the eavesdropper, while satisfying the individual power constraint of each relay node and worst-case SINR constraint at the desired receiver under a bounded spherical region for the norm of the CSI error vector from the relays to the destination.Cooperative beamforming weight vector in the security scheme can be obtained by using S-Procedure and rank relaxation techniques.The benefit of the proposed scheme is showed in simulation results.
This paper proposes a message-prioritization based unequal secrecy protection framework for untrusted two- way relaying networks, where two terminal users communicate bidirectionally with the assistance of an untrusted relay. Each user is assumed to have two messages with distinct priorities: high priority and low priority. The high priority messages (HPM) are first transmitted, for which we devise a constellation overlapping method such that the received signals at the relay overlap with each other and a high error floor is created to prevent the untrusted relay from deciphering the information. Upon the completion of HPM exchange, users transmit their low priority messages (LPM) using a noise aggregation approach. To be specific, each user superposes its LPM onto the previously decoded HPM from the other user. By exploiting the difference between the error patterns for HPM at the terminal users and the relay, channel noises in various time slots can be aggregated at the relay to secure the LPM transmission. It is shown from simulation results that HPM is guaranteed to have greater reliability and higher secrecy level than that of LPM. However, the transmission of LPM enjoys lower implementation complexity and reduced system overhead, which fully demonstrates that the proposed unequal secrecy protection scheme can realize a good performance-complexity tradeoff.