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CRC Press eBooks

Fundamentals of Physical Layer Security

Xiangyun Zhou, Lingyang Song, Yan Zhang

Published Nov 7, 2013• 10 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In virtually all communication systems, the issues of authentication, confidentiality, and privacy are handled in the upper layers of the protocol stack using variations of private-key and public-key cryptosystems. These cryptosystems are usually based upon mathematical operations, such as the factorization into prime factors, believed hard to perform for an attacker with limited computational power; hence, we refer to the security provided by these systems as computational security. While computational security has a clear trackrecord of proven effectiveness, it may be difficult to implement in some emerging network architectures. For example, the advent of wireless networks has fostered the development of mobile adhoc networks comprised of many devices with heterogenous capabilities; the wide range of computing power available in the devices makes it difficult to deploy a public-key infrastructure. In contrast with the established practice of computational security, many results from information theory, signal processing, and cryptography suggest that there is much security to be gained by accounting for the imperfections of the physical layer when designing secure systems. For instance, while noise and fading are usually treated as impairments in wireless communications, information-theoretic results show that they can be harnessed to “hide” messages from a potential eavesdropper or authenticate devices, without requiring a shared secret key. Such results, if they can be implemented in a costefficient way without sacrificing much data rate, call for the design of security solutions at the physical layer itself to complement computational security mechanisms.

DOI
10.1201/b15496-5

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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.

CRC Press eBooks•Nov 7, 2013•2 citations
In virtually all communication systems, the issues of authentication, confidentiality, and privacy are handled in the upper layers of the protocol stack using variations of private-key and public-key cryptosystems. These cryptosystems are usually based upon mathematical operations, such as the factorization into prime factors, believed hard to perform for an attacker with limited computational power; hence, we refer to the security provided by these systems as computational security. While computational security has a clear trackrecord of proven effectiveness, it may be difficult to implement in some emerging network architectures. For example, the advent of wireless networks has fostered the development of mobile adhoc networks comprised of many devices with heterogenous capabilities; the wide range of computing power available in the devices makes it difficult to deploy a public-key infrastructure. In contrast with the established practice of computational security, many results from information theory, signal processing, and cryptography suggest that there is much security to be gained by accounting for the imperfections of the physical layer when designing secure systems. For instance, while noise and fading are usually treated as impairments in wireless communications, information-theoretic results show that they can be harnessed to “hide” messages from a potential eavesdropper or authenticate devices, without requiring a shared secret key. Such results, if they can be implemented in a costefficient way without sacrificing much data rate, call for the design of security solutions at the physical layer itself to complement computational security mechanisms.
Security issues for traditional wireless networks have been considered as a very important research area, and have taken a considerable attention for several years due to the broadcast nature of the wireless medium, which makes attacks more likely to happen than in wireline systems. Most of the studies in this area focus on the security in the higher layers in the protocol stack via the use of cryptography and key management. The main idea of these security approaches is based on the limited computational power of the eavesdroppers. With the advent of the infrastructureless networks such as mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), further challenges have appeared which make the nodes more vulnerable to attacks. Among these challenges are the absence of centralized hardware for security problems, the multihop routes that the transmitted information should follow, and the power-limited terminals [152]. Therefore, to cope with these limitations, physical layer security (or informationtheoretic security) has gained a considerable attention in the last few years. The goal of physical layer security is to allow the source to confidentially communicate with the legitimate destination, while the eavesdropper cannot interpret the source information, without any assumption for the eavesdropper nodes such as the computational power, or the available information. From an information-theoretic standpoint, the achieved source-destination confidential rate is called the achievable secrecy rate.
To ensure confidentiality, today's communications are encrypted under the notion of computational security, using hard mathematical problems to build ciphers that apparently cannot be cracked in a useful time. However, as these constructions are not agnostic to technological advances, some of these problems may be solved efficiently with future technologies, e.g. quantum computing. In wireless networks, physical layer security emerges as a post-quantum security solution that promises to mitigate these threats. This concept of secrecy exploits the physical properties of the wireless channel to encode information so that a certain degree of statistical independence between the message and the cyphertext is observed by the eavesdropper. This notion of secrecy allows building cryptosystems that are agnostic to the computing capabilities of the attacker, being widely accepted as one of the strongest notions of secrecy created so far. The objective of this chapter is to overview the concept of physical layer security and understand how its integration could be done in future wireless networks. For that purpose, the information-theoretical framework grounding the concept is introduced, and some basic design approaches are presented. These include PHY key generation methods, secure beamforming techniques, and cooperative jamming constructions. The mechanisms to enable the integration of these technologies in future 5G and beyond networks are discussed last.
An overview of physical-layer security theory for wireless communication is presented, along with a discussion of the potential feasibility to smart cities and potential future research directions. For a long time security at the physical-layer has been neglected in favour of computational methods implemented at the upper-layers of the protocol stack. Upper-layer cryptography techniques use encryption with a shared-key to achieve secrecy. This security is invariably achieved using cryptographic methods. Current encryption methods are deemed to be secure because the level of computational power required to crack the keys is not attainable using current technology. Nonetheless, the rise of more powerful technologies such as quantum computing may soon challenge this assumption. The computational complexities required to implement public key encryption prevents low-resource devices from using them. This can have a significant impact on wireless systems for Smart Cities which might be limited in terms of available power or computational overhead.
This paper provides a comprehensive review of the domain of physical layer security in multiuser wireless networks. The essential premise of physical layer security is to enable the exchange of confidential messages over a wireless medium in the presence of unauthorized eavesdroppers, without relying on higher-layer encryption. This can be achieved primarily in two ways: without the need for a secret key by intelligently designing transmit coding strategies, or by exploiting the wireless communication medium to develop secret keys over public channels. The survey begins with an overview of the foundations dating back to the pioneering work of Shannon and Wyner on information-theoretic security. We then describe the evolution of secure transmission strategies from point-to-point channels to multiple-antenna systems, followed by generalizations to multiuser broadcast, multiple-access, interference, and relay networks. Secret-key generation and establishment protocols based on physical layer mechanisms are subsequently covered. Approaches for secrecy based on channel coding design are then examined, along with a description of inter-disciplinary approaches based on game theory and stochastic geometry. The associated problem of physical layer message authentication is also briefly introduced. The survey concludes with observations on potential research directions in this area.
The goal of physical layer security (PLS) is to make use of the properties of the physical layer, including the wireless communication medium and the transceiver hardware, to enable critical aspects of secure communications. In particular, PLS can be employed to provide i) node authentication, ii) message authentication, and, iii) message confidentiality. Unlike the corresponding classical cryptographic approaches which are all based on computational security, PLS's added strength is that it is based on information theoretic security, in which no limitation with respect to the opponent's computational power is assumed and is therefore inherently quantum resistant. In this survey, we review the aforementioned fundamental aspects of PLS, starting with node authentication, moving to the information theoretic characterization of message integrity, and finally, discussing message confidentiality both in the secret key generation from shared randomness and from the wiretap channel point of view. The aim of this review is to provide a comprehensive roadmap on important relevant results by the authors and other contributors and discuss open issues on the applicability of PLS in sixth generation systems.
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.