In this paper, we analyze the four-node relay wiretap channel, where the relay performs amplify-and-forward. There is no direct link between transmitter and receiver available. The transmitter has multiple antennas, which assist in securing the transmission over both phases. In case of full channel state information (CSI), the transmitter can apply information leakage neutralization in order to prevent the eavesdropper from obtaining any information about the signal sent. This gets more challenging, if the transmitter has only an outdated estimate of the channel from the relay to the eavesdropper. For this case, we optimize the worst case secrecy rate by choosing intelligently the beamforming vectors and the power allocation at the transmitter and the relay.
In this paper, we analyze the four-node relay wiretap channel, where the relay performs amplify-and-forward. There is no direct link between transmitter and receiver available. The transmitter has multiple antennas, which assist in securing the transmission over both phases. In case of full channel state information (CSI), the transmitter can apply information leakage neutralization in order to prevent the eavesdropper from obtaining any information about the signal sent. This gets more challenging, if the transmitter has only an outdated estimate of the channel from the relay to the eavesdropper. For this case, we optimize the worst case secrecy rate by choosing intelligently the beamforming vectors and the power allocation at the transmitter and the relay.
Within this thesis, we investigate the possibilities of physical layer secrecy for two special system models. In detail, we study beamforming and protection strategies in the Multiple-Input Single-Output (MISO) Gaussian Wiretap Channel (WTC) and the Gaussian two-hop relay WTC with multiple antennas at transmitter and receiver. In both system models, we examine the influence of partial Channel State Information (CSI) on the link to the eavesdropper and compare the achievable secrecy rates with the case of full CSI. We show for the MISO WTC that in the fast fading scenario the Beamforming Vector (BV) can be optimized such that the ergodic secrecy rate is maximized with regard to the degree of channel knowledge. Further we show that the ergodic secrecy rate can be significantly increased by usage of Artificial Noise (AN), if applied in a smart way. This means that the degree of channel knowledge on the link to the eavesdropper influences the portion of power that is spent for AN at the transmitter as well as the direction, in which the AN signal is sent. In addition, we apply the same beamforming and protection strategies to the slow fading scenario and find that these techniques also reduce the secrecy outage probability. For the two-hop relay WTC, we introduce Information Leakage Neutralization (IN) as a new protection strategy. If applied to a system model, where the transmitter has full CSI, the instantaneous secrecy rate performs almost as well as the instantaneous capacity of the peaceful system without an eavesdropper. The IN protected scheme outperforms the AN protected approach and performs much better than any beamforming scheme without additional protection mechanism. Another positive aspect of the IN protected scheme in the case of full CSI is that conventional channel codes can be applied instead of wiretap codes. For the case of partial CSI, where the transmitter has only an outdated estimate on the channel between relay and the eavesdropper, we show that the IN protected scheme can also be applied. Here, it strongly depends on the channel realizations and the delay of the estimate, whether the IN or the AN protection scheme should be applied.
In this paper, we analyze the achievable secrecy rates in the two-hop wiretap channel with four nodes, where the transmitter and the receiver have multiple antennas while the relay and the eavesdropper have only a single antenna each. The relay is operating in amplify-and-forward mode and all the channels between the nodes are known perfectly by the transmitter. We discuss different transmission and protection schemes like artificial noise (AN). Furthermore, we introduce interference neutralization (IN) as a new protection scheme. We compare the different schemes regarding the high-SNR slope and the high-SNR power offset and illustrate the performance by simulation results. It is shown analytically as well as by numerical simulations that the high SNR performance of the proposed IN scheme is better than the one of AN.
Achieving secure transmission in wireless network is a significantly important research topic. Classic cryptography encrypts a confidential message to an unreadable cipher message. Thus only the authentic receiver with correct secrecy key is able to decrypt the message. However, with the growing computational capability of adversaries, the requirement of secrecy key generation and distribution is getting stringent. Another method to achieve wireless security, which has attracted much attention in recent years, is through physical layer processing, named physical layer security. In a typical wiretap channel model consisting of a transmitter, a legal receiver and an adversary (illegal receiver), early works have proven that it is possible to achieve positive secrecy rate using multiple antenna techniques, such as beamforming, at the transmitter. In this thesis, we focus on two types of malicious behaviors of the adversary: passive eavesdropping and active attack. For the passive eavesdropping, we first consider the multi-input-single-output (MISO) wiretap channel, in which the legitimate transmitter utilizes the artificial noise aided precoding strategy to maximize the achievable secrecy rate of the channel. Both scenarios of known and unknown channel state information (CSI) for the eavesdropper channels are considered. By deriving the closed-form expression of ergodic secrecy rate, we prove that there exists an optimal power ratio between the information signal and the artificial noise. We then extend our study to a four-node fading channel model in a wireless relay network, which includes two single-antenna users, one single-antenna eavesdropper and one relay node equipped with multiple antennas. By studying the decode-and-forward (DF) scheme, cooperative jamming (CJ) scheme and one proposed hybrid relay scheme, relay-and-jamming (RJ), we aims to find the optimal relay scheme with the condition that the transmitter and the relay node are under individual power constraints and the CSI of the illegitimate channel is only statistically known. Our analysis shows that the hybrid RJ scheme is optimal when the transmitter has a relatively small power budget and/or the transmitter is far away from the intended receiver. Besides the passive eavesdropping, the adversary could also choose the active attack. The pilot spoofing attack is one active attack conducted by the adversary during the channel estimation phase of the legitimate transmission. In practical systems, the pilot signals are usually known \textit{a priori} and repeatedly used information. In this attack, an intelligent adversary spoofs the transmitter on the estimation of CSI by sending the identical pilot signal as the legitimate receiver. By doing so, the adversary could obtain a larger channel rate in the data transmission phase, and also drastically weaken the strength of the received signal at the legitimate receiver if the adversary utilizes large enough power. Due to the serious consequences caused by such an attack, we first propose an energy ratio detector (ERD) that explores the asymmetry of received signal power levels at the transmitter and the legitimate receiver when the attack occurs. Our analysis shows that the ERD could provide very high probability of detection with certain requirement on the false alarming probability. Furthermore, we design a two-way training based scheme to provide not only attack detection but also secure transmission. The two-way training based detector (TWTD) exploits the intrusive component created by the adversary, followed by a secure beamforming-assisted data transmission. In addition to the good detection performance, our scheme could estimate both legitimate and illegitimate channels, with which the beamforming could be designed for data transmission.
In this paper, we investigate the secure relay beamforming problems for the amplify-and-forward (AF) relay network, where the transmitter sends the information to the receiver with the help of a multiple-antenna relay in the presence of an eavesdropper. We first study the secrecy rate maximization (SRM) problem in the case of complete channel state information (CSI). The rank-1 relay beamformer, which has been solved in our previous work in “Secure relay beamforming with imperfect channel side information,” IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol., vol. 62, no. 5, pp. 2140-2155, June 2013, is rigorously proved to be globally optimal. Then, we turn to the case of partial eavesdropper's CSI (ECSI), where the uncertainty of ECSI is characterized as a bounded region, and study the worst-case secrecy rate maximization (WCSRM) problem. Different from the common spherical uncertainty region, the uncertainty region adopted in our paper imposes independent constraints on the channel gain and direction. With the proposed uncertainty region, we give an in-depth analysis of the WCSRM problem. We solve the rank-1 relay beamformer in an explicit form and move a step further by establishing the sufficient conditions for the global optimality of the rank-1 solution. Besides, the rank-2 relay beamformer with a special singular value decomposition (SVD) structure is also considered. By reducing the optimization variables into single variable, we show that the proposed rank-2 solution can be solved by simple line search. The asymptotic optimality of the proposed rank-2 relay beamformer in the high relay power region is also proved under mild conditions. Finally, numerical results are presented to verify the analysis in the paper.
The physical layer security technology is an effective way to reduce information leakage in a wireless communication system. In this paper, we study the physical-layer security of one-way wiretap channel which contains a source-destination pair, an eavesdropper and multiple cooperating relay nodes. What's more, in this channel, there exists direct link between the source and the destination (eavesdropper) and lacks he eavesdropper's channel state information (ECSI). To address its physical-layer security, we proposed a scheme which combines amplify-and-forward (AF)-based relay beamforming and cooperation jamming (CJ) technology. We aim at minimizing the power available for transmitting desired information in relays and optimizing the relay weights under the scenario of limiting the signal to ratio at the destination to a given range, which can be solved by convex optimization techniques. After that, we prove that the optimization results are unique and globally optimum. And the numerical results show that the proposed design can effectively enhance secure transmission rate.
Secrecy on the physical layer is a promising technique to simplify the overall cross-layer secrecy concept. In many recent works on the multiple antenna wiretap channel, perfect channel state information to the intended receiver as well as the passive eavesdropper are assumed. In this work, the transmitter has only partial information about the channel to the eavesdropper, but full information on the main channel to the intended receiver. The applied channel model is the flat-fading multiple-input single-output wiretap channel. We minimize the outage probability of secure transmission under single-stream beamforming. Additionally, we derive a suboptimal beamforming scheme based on a Markov bound, which performs reasonably well. The results generalize the cases with perfect as well as without channel state information of the eavesdropper channel. Numerical simulations illustrate the secrecy outage probability over the degree of channel knowledge and confirm the theoretical results.