Wireless broadcast allows widespread and easy information transfer. However, it may expose the information to unintended receivers, which could include eavesdroppers. As a solution, cryptography at the higher network levels has been used to encrypt and protect data. Cryptography relies on the fact that the computational power of the adversary is not enough to break the encryption. However, due to increasing computing power, the adversary power also increases. To further strengthen the security and complement the encryption, the concept of physical layer security has been introduced and surged an enormous amount of research. Widely speaking, the research in physical layer security can be divided into two directions: the information-theoretic and signal processing paradigms. This thesis starts with an overview of the physical layer security literature and continues with the contributions which are divided into the two following parts. In the first part, we investigate the information-theoretic secrecy rate. In the first scenario, we study the confidentiality of a bidirectional satellite network consisting of two mobile users who exchange two messages via a multibeam satellite using the XOR network coding protocol. We maximize the sum secrecy rate by designing the optimal beamforming vector along with optimizing the return and forward link time allocation. In the second scenario, we study the effect of interference on the secrecy rate. We investigate the secrecy rate in a two-user interference network where one of the users, namely user 1, requires to establish a confidential connection. User 1 wants to prevent an unintended user of the network to decode its transmission. User 1 has to adjust its transmission power such that its secrecy rate is maximized while the quality of service at the destination of the other user, user 2, is satisfied. We obtain closed-form solutions for optimal joint power control. In the third scenario, we study secrecy rate over power ratio, namely ``secrecy energy efficiency''. We design the optimal beamformer for a multiple-input single-output system with and without considering the minimum required secrecy rate at the destination. In the second part, we follow the signal processing paradigm to improve the security. We employ the directional modulation concept to enhance the security of a multi-user multiple-input multiple-output communication system in the presence of a multi-antenna eavesdropper. Enhancing the security is accomplished by increasing the symbol error rate at the eavesdropper without the eavesdropper's CSI. We show that when the eavesdropper has less antennas than the users, regardless of the received signal SNR, it cannot recover any useful information; in addition, it has to go through extra noise enhancing processes to estimate the symbols when it has more antennas than the users. Finally, we summarize the conclusions and discuss the promising research directions in the physical layer security.
Wireless broadcast allows widespread and easy information transfer. However, it may expose the information to unintended receivers, which could include eavesdroppers. As a solution, cryptography at the higher network levels has been used to encrypt and protect data. Cryptography relies on the fact that the computational power of the adversary is not enough to break the encryption. However, due to increasing computing power, the adversary power also increases. To further strengthen the security and complement the encryption, the concept of physical layer security has been introduced and surged an enormous amount of research. Widely speaking, the research in physical layer security can be divided into two directions: the information-theoretic and signal processing paradigms. This thesis starts with an overview of the physical layer security literature and continues with the contributions which are divided into the two following parts. In the first part, we investigate the information-theoretic secrecy rate. In the first scenario, we study the confidentiality of a bidirectional satellite network consisting of two mobile users who exchange two messages via a multibeam satellite using the XOR network coding protocol. We maximize the sum secrecy rate by designing the optimal beamforming vector along with optimizing the return and forward link time allocation. In the second scenario, we study the effect of interference on the secrecy rate. We investigate the secrecy rate in a two-user interference network where one of the users, namely user 1, requires to establish a confidential connection. User 1 wants to prevent an unintended user of the network to decode its transmission. User 1 has to adjust its transmission power such that its secrecy rate is maximized while the quality of service at the destination of the other user, user 2, is satisfied. We obtain closed-form solutions for optimal joint power control. In the third scenario, we study secrecy rate over power ratio, namely ``secrecy energy efficiency''. We design the optimal beamformer for a multiple-input single-output system with and without considering the minimum required secrecy rate at the destination. In the second part, we follow the signal processing paradigm to improve the security. We employ the directional modulation concept to enhance the security of a multi-user multiple-input multiple-output communication system in the presence of a multi-antenna eavesdropper. Enhancing the security is accomplished by increasing the symbol error rate at the eavesdropper without the eavesdropper's CSI. We show that when the eavesdropper has less antennas than the users, regardless of the received signal SNR, it cannot recover any useful information; in addition, it has to go through extra noise enhancing processes to estimate the symbols when it has more antennas than the users. Finally, we summarize the conclusions and discuss the promising research directions in the physical layer security.
Physical layer security is a promising technique for information security. In multi-antenna systems, secure transmission designs are of crucial importance for physical layer security. In this thesis, our research focuses on the secure transmission designs for jamming signal aided multi-antenna systems. We first investigate robust secure transmission designs for a cooperative jamming aided multiple-input-single-output (MISO) system. Two scenarios are considered: (a) eavesdroppers' channel state information (ECSI) is available and (b) ECSI is unavailable. In scenario (a), a quality-of-service (QoS)-based design is considered to minimize the worst case signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio at the eavesdroppers. A secrecy rate based design is also studied. In scenario (b), a QoS-based design is considered to maximize the power of jamming signals, and the secrecy rate based design is not applicable. We propose an algorithm for each design problem through semidefinite relaxation. Our analysis shows that, even though the beamforming scheme in our designs is fixed as single stream beamforming, this does not cause any loss of optimality. We further consider secure transmission designs for a simultaneous wireless information and power transfer enabled MISO heterogeneous cellular network. In the considered system, all base stations (BSs) send confidential messages to information receivers and energy signals to energy receivers (ERs). BSs collaboratively utilize the energy signals as jamming signals to cripple ERs' interceptions. We propose a sum logarithmic secrecy rate maximization design problem. To tackle the design problem, we propose a semidefinite relaxation and successive convex approximation based centralized secure transmission design algorithm. Moreover, an alternating direction method of multipliers based distributed secure transmission design is also proposed. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. Secure transmission is designed for a cooperative jamming aided MISO non-orthogonal multiple access system. We consider an outage constrained secure transmission design problem under the assumption that only statistical ECSI is available. In the design problem, the minimum probabilistic secrecy rate is maximized. Based on 0-norm and the path-following approach, we develop an algorithm to find a solution to the design problem. Simulation results demonstrate that the secrecy outage probability can be guaranteed through the proposed secure transmission design algorithm.
The use of physical layer methods for improving the security of wireless links has recently become the focus of a considerable research effort. Such methods can be used in combination with cryptography to enhance the exchange of confidential messages over a wireless medium in the presence of unauthorized eavesdroppers, or they can be used to enable secrecy in the absence of shared secret keys through the use of coding strategies, jamming or beamforming. Indeed, one of the driving forces behind the recent emergence of physical layer techniques for security is the push toward adding extra degrees of freedom in the form of multiple antennas at the transmitter and receiver of the link. Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless systems have been extensively studied during the past two decades, and their potential gains in throughput, diversity, and range have been well quantified. MIMO approaches are now an integral part of the WiFi and 4G standards in use today. It is not surprising that MIMO architectures are useful in improving wireless security as well, since they can provide focused transmit selectivity of both information and noise toward desired and undesired receivers. In this chapter, we discuss a number of different ways that physical layer security can be achieved in wireless networks with MIMO links. We will focus primarily on signal processing related issues (e.g., beamforming, power control, resource allocation) that enable reliable reception at intended recipients and minimize data leakage to eavesdroppers, and we will consider a variety of different MIMO settings including point-to-point, broadcast, interference, and multi-hop networks. We cannot offer an exhaustive survey of such methods in just a single chapter; instead, we present a few representative approaches that illustrate ✐ ✐ — — ✐ ✐ ✐ ✐ ✐ ✐ Physical Layer Security in Wireless the gains that multiple antennas provide. Additional and more complete treatments of the physical layer security problem can be found in [1-4] as well as other chapters in this book.
In this thesis, we study the physical layer security in downlink multi-user wireless networks. Traditionally, security has been addressed by cryptography at the higher layers of the communication stack. Security at the physical layer has been a major research topic in recent years. We study two different precoder designs alongside artificial noise (AN) to mitigate multi-user interference and deteriorate reception at the eavesdropper (Eve). We study the large scale analysis to calculate the secrecy sum-rate for these two cases and analyze the effect of AN on the system. First, we consider the worst case scenario, when eavesdropper's (Eve's) rate is not deteriorated by the interference caused by the legitimate users. Later, we investigate how interference from legitimate users would affect the large scale security sum rate. At the end, we assume more practical situation where the channel state information at the transmitter is not perfect due to feedback limitation and estimation error. We first study block diagonalization (BD) precoding. We derive the asymptotic secrecy sum-rate of BD for physical layer security in downlink multi-user wireless networks using artificial noise (AN). We first derive the secrecy sum-rate assuming that the channel of the eavesdropper is not known at the transmitter and derive the asymptotic secrecy sum-rate. Then we derive the optimum power allocation for asymptotic secrecy sum-rate. We design the system based on large scale analysis for different special cases. Simulation results show that the proposed precoders outperform channel inversion (CI) and regularized channel inversion (RCI) schemes at all SNRs. We also show that as the number of receive antennas of each user increases, the sum-rate gap between the proposed scheme and existing methods increases. We, then, study two methods of regularized block diagonalization (RBD) precoding using artificial noise (AN) for physical layer security in downlink multi-user MIMO wireless networks. We compare the complexity analysis of these two methods in terms of floating point operations per second (FLOPS). We derive the secrecy and asymptotic secrecy sum-rates for these schemes. We also derive closed form expressions for the asymptotic optimal power allocation to the AN signal and legitimate users. Simulations show RBD precoding outperform regularized channel inversion (RCI) in terms of secrecy sum-rate with a margin of 0.5 bits/s/Hz. Also, simulation results show our closed-form asymptotic secrecy sum-rates matches closely with the simulations for perfect and imperfect CSIT. We also study the effect of interference on BD precoding scheme. In the first two studies the worst case scenarios was considered and the effect of interference was not considered at the eavesdropper. We first derive the closed-form secrecy and asymptotic secrecy sum-rates for this scheme. Then, we derive the optimum power allocation. Using the derived optimum power allocation, we determine the conditions under which adding AN helps. We also investigate the optimum number of users, number of antennas at the eavesdropper, and the number of transmit antennas to fully study the conditions where using AN improves performance. We show that as the number of users increases or the number of receive antennas at the eavesdropper decreases, improved performance is achieved by allocating a smaller fraction of the total power to transmit the AN. The closed form expressions for the secrecy sum rate (SSR) and optimum power allocation closely match our simulation results. In Chapter 5, we study the effect of imperfect channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) for each case studied in earlier chapters. We first study the effect of imperfect CSIT for BD precoding in both scenarios when interference does and does not exist at eavesdropper. We show that the imperfect CSI play the same role as interference for the desired users. Then, we study the effect of imperfect CSIT for RBD precoding when interference does not exist at eavesdropper. We show as channel estimation error increases, the secrecy sum-rate decreases. This is due to the fact that channel estimation error just affects the desired users' rate and has no effect on eavesdropper's performance. Finally, in the last chapter, we conclude our thesis and provide some road map for future--Author's abstract
Security has become an increasingly significant and urgent issue in wireless networks. The growing computational capability of the eavesdropper (Eve) and more and more complicated secure key management in large scale and heterogeneous networks, pose more and more stringent requirement to the cryptographic protocols. As a new design paradigm, physical layer security has been recognised as a promising solution to enhance the security of wireless links relying on the channel properties and advanced signal processing, and can act as either an alternative or a complementary solution to the conventional cryptographic methods. Without complicated secure key generation and management, physical layer security is quite suitable for the large scale distributed networks. In this thesis, we aim to improve the secrecy performance in emerging wireless communication systems relying on different physical layer security techniques. Firstly, the security of an amplify-and-forward successive relaying network with multiple untrusted relay nodes is investigated, where the conventional detrimental inter-relay interference is exploited to jam the untrusted nodes without assistance of external helpers. Considering different complexity requirements, several relay selection schemes are proposed, and the closed-form expressions of the lower bound of the secrecy outage probability and the maximum secrecy diversity order are derived accordingly. It is shown that the maximum secrecy diversity order of N-1 can be achieved for an N relay nodes network. Secondly, the artificial noise (AN) aided secure transmission strategy for a multiple-input single-output multiple-Eve (MISOME) system with a secure user (Bob) and a normal user (NU) is investigated. The power allocations among Bob, NU and AN, as well as the wiretap code rates, are jointly optimized to maximize the effective secrecy throughput (EST), under the average throughput constraint of NU. An alternative optimization algorithm with guaranteed convergence is proposed to obtain the optimal parameters. It is shown that the EST increases with the transmitting power and the number of transmit antennas, and decreases with the throughput constraint of NU, and the EST can be improved through injecting AN and concurrent transmission of Bob and NU. Thirdly, physical layer security in a multi-antenna small-cell network is investigated, where the multi-antenna base stations (BSs), cellular users, and Eves are all randomly distributed according to independent Poisson point processes. Stochastic geometry is applied to analyze the connection and secrecy outage probabilities and the average achievable secrecy rate. The impact of different parameters, including power allocation, BS and Eve density, and the adaptive eavesdropping or jamming on the secrecy performance is analyzed. It is shown that the average secrecy rate is a quasi-concave function of the power allocation factor and monotonically decreases with the ratio of the Eve-BS density. Finally, we study the physical layer security in a large-scale heterogeneous network consisting of both sub-6 GHz massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) macro cells and millimeter wave (mmWave) small cells. By considering pilot spoofing attacks from the Eves, the coverage and secrecy probabilities are derived using stochastic geometry and the conditions under which the millimeter wave tier outperforms the sub-6 GHz counterpart are discussed in terms of both coverage and secrecy.It is shown that the mmWave small cell can provide better coverage performance in the high transmission code-rate region, and the secrecy performance of the mmWave system outperforms the sub-6 GHz counterpart in the low redundant rate region, which reveals the advantage of using mmWave for secure communication.
In this dissertation, we present novel physical (PHY) and cross-layer design guidelines and resource adaptation algorithms to improve the security and user experience in the future wireless networks. Physical and cross-layer wireless security measures can provide stronger overall security with high efficiency and can also provide better flexibility in response to the typically time-varying wireless environment. To better utilize limited wireless resources, we present approaches and techniques based on new performance criteria for wireless system optimization by thoroughly exploiting user information including its Quality of Service (QoS) requests and channel state information (CSI) to improve network throughput and security.
In recent years, there has been a growing research interest in wireless system security from PHY layer perspective. In a wiretap channel model introduced in the seminal work by Wyner, a sender “Alice” wishes to transmit a secret message to the intended receiver “Bob” in presence of a passive eavesdropper “Eve”. Existing works have characterized maximum achievable secrecy rate or secrecy capacity for single- and multiple-antenna systems by applying Gaussian signaling and secrecy code. Despite the impracticality of Gaussian input, its compact closed-form expression of mutual information motivated the wide use of Gaussian input assumption in theoretical analysis. In contrast to the Gaussian codebook, practical wiretap codes must consist of finite-alphabet symbols. Because of this constraint, the achievable secrecy rate for a finite-alphabet input scenario would differ from the secrecy rate achievable by a Gaussian codebook. In this thesis, we quantify the effect of finite discrete-constellation on instantaneous and ergodic secrecy rate of multiple-antenna wire-tap channels. Our results demonstrate substantial performance difference between systems involving finite-alphabet inputs and systems with Gaussian inputs. In addition, we investigate the secrecy performance of multi-terminal wiretap systems when a codebook based transmission beamforming is implemented. We characterize the secrecy outage probability of a communication link under eavesdropping. We consider a limited feedback scenario where the transmitter uses a pre-defined codebook known to both the transmitter and the receiver for beamforming, and analyze the secrecy outage probability of the link when it being eavesdropped.
Next, we consider the security of wireless multi-hop networks. Certainly, network security is an overarching issue that transcends all layers of communication protocol stack. Therefore, we tackle the problem of network security by proper user scheduling, routing, and resource management. Our approach of secrecy is complementary to the traditional cryptography based techniques. Together, they can provide stronger overall security and flexibility in selecting the desired solution and can reduce bandwidth and energy overhead as much as possible. Multi-hop wireless networks frequently employ the traditional routing and resource allocation strategies. Such strategies often fail to take into account the additional need for protection against security vulnerabilities due to the wireless medium. Thus, to address security concerns, we investigate the problem of eavesdropping control by proposing security-aware power allocation strategies and routing algorithms for multi-hop networks.
The future wireless infrastructure will consists of a plethora of heterogeneous collections of applications and services. A differentiated service structure would therefore be an essential part of the future wireless infrastructure. In addition to the security consideration of wireless network, we focus on the heterogeneous structure of the network. We study the problem of cross-layer resource allocation and admission control in a multiuser heterogeneous OFDMA network providing both QoS-constrained user servicesand best-effort services. Such heterogeneous networks provide service to both High-Priority (HP) users and Best-Effort (BE) users. By clustering subcarriers, efficient algorithms for cluster and power allocation have been proposed. Our strategy maximizes the total network utility of the BE users while satisfying the QoS request for maximum number of HP users. The feasibility of the resource allocation problem depends on the number of HP users in the network. Since a large number of demanding HP users would render the resource allocation problem infeasible, a joint admission control and resource allocation scheme could be an efficient way of tackling both problems with less overhead. By incorporating admission control, we propose an efficient and optimal joint admission control and resource allocation algorithm.
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.