The rapid growth in wireless communication systems has provided a flexibility of communication and content that has had a transformative impact to all aspects of society.However, the broadcast nature of the wireless medium makes these systems vulnerable to passive attacks in which the adversary attempts to eavesdrop on the transmitted messages, and to active attacks in which the adversary can intelligently manipulate legitimate transmissions, both of which can jeopardize a myriad of critical wireless services.Hence, it is imperative to design wireless networks with safeguards in place to ensure their resilience to attacks.To that end, this dissertation provides various perspectives in the domain of information theoretic secrecy and authentication, which provably guarantees security, regardless of the computational capabilities of the adversary.We strive to bridge the gap between the information theory of security and the practically implementable protocols within this paradigm.We first consider point to point secure communication over flat fading wireless channels under delay constraint.We extend the definition of outage capacity to account for the secrecy constraint and obtain sharp characterizations of the corresponding fundamental limits under different assumptions on the transmitter channel state information (CSI).The capacity achieving scheme relies on opportunistically exchanging private keys between the legitimate nodes.These keys are stored in a key buffer and used to secure delay sensitive data.We also characterize the optimal 4.5 Multiple Preauthenticated Helpers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The rapid growth in wireless communication systems has provided a flexibility of communication and content that has had a transformative impact to all aspects of society.However, the broadcast nature of the wireless medium makes these systems vulnerable to passive attacks in which the adversary attempts to eavesdrop on the transmitted messages, and to active attacks in which the adversary can intelligently manipulate legitimate transmissions, both of which can jeopardize a myriad of critical wireless services.Hence, it is imperative to design wireless networks with safeguards in place to ensure their resilience to attacks.To that end, this dissertation provides various perspectives in the domain of information theoretic secrecy and authentication, which provably guarantees security, regardless of the computational capabilities of the adversary.We strive to bridge the gap between the information theory of security and the practically implementable protocols within this paradigm.We first consider point to point secure communication over flat fading wireless channels under delay constraint.We extend the definition of outage capacity to account for the secrecy constraint and obtain sharp characterizations of the corresponding fundamental limits under different assumptions on the transmitter channel state information (CSI).The capacity achieving scheme relies on opportunistically exchanging private keys between the legitimate nodes.These keys are stored in a key buffer and used to secure delay sensitive data.We also characterize the optimal 4.5 Multiple Preauthenticated Helpers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
This paper considers point-to-point secure communication over flat fading channels under an outage constraint. More specifically, we extend the definition of outage capacity to account for the secrecy constraint and obtain sharp characterizations of the corresponding fundamental limits under two different assumptions on the transmitter channel state information (CSI). First, we find the outage secrecy capacity assuming that the transmitter has perfect knowledge of the legitimate and eavesdropper channel gains. In this scenario, the capacity achieving scheme relies on opportunistically exchanging private keys between the legitimate nodes. These keys are stored in a key buffer and later used to secure delay sensitive data using the Vernam's one time pad technique. We then extend our results to the more practical scenario where the transmitter is assumed to know only the legitimate channel gain. Here, our achievability arguments rely on privacy amplification techniques to generate secret key bits. In the two cases, we also characterize the optimal power control policies which, interestingly, turn out to be a judicious combination of channel inversion and the optimal ergodic strategy. Finally, we analyze the effect of key buffer overflow on the overall outage probability.
This paper considers point to point secure communication over flat fading channels under an outage constraint. More specifically, we extend the definition of outage capacity to account for the secrecy constraint and obtain sharp characterizations of the corresponding fundamental limits under two different assumptions on the transmitter CSI (Channel state information). First, we find the outage secrecy capacity assuming that the transmitter has perfect knowledge of the legitimate and eavesdropper channel gains. In this scenario, the capacity achieving scheme relies on opportunistically exchanging private keys between the legitimate nodes. These keys are stored in a key buffer and later used to secure delay sensitive data using the Vernam's one time pad technique. We then extend our results to the more practical scenario where the transmitter is assumed to know only the legitimate channel gain. Here, our achievability arguments rely on privacy amplification techniques to generate secret key bits. In the two cases, we also characterize the optimal power control policies which, interestingly, turn out to be a judicious combination of channel inversion and the optimal ergodic strategy. Finally, we analyze the effect of key buffer overflow on the overall outage probability.
This paper considers point to point secure communication over flat fading channels under an outage constraint. More specifically, we extend the definition of outage capacity to account for the secrecy constraint and obtain sharp characterizations of the corresponding fundamental limits under two different assumptions on the transmitter CSI (Channel state information). First, we find the outage secrecy capacity assuming that the transmitter has perfect knowledge of the legitimate and eavesdropper channel gains. In this scenario, the capacity achieving scheme relies on opportunistically exchanging private keys between the legitimate nodes. These keys are stored in a key buffer and later used to secure delay sensitive data using the Vernam's one time pad technique. We then extend our results to the more practical scenario where the transmitter is assumed to know only the legitimate channel gain. Here, our achievability arguments rely on privacy amplification techniques to generate secret key bits. In the two cases, we also characterize the optimal power control policies which, interestingly, turn out to be a judicious combination of channel inversion and the optimal ergodic strategy. Finally, we analyze the effect of key buffer overflow on the overall outage probability.
This dissertation studies the fundamental rate limits of wireless communication systems through which confidential messages can be transmitted without being intercepted by an adversary. It is assumed that the adversary is subject to noise and interference, as are the legitimate nodes in the system. The security guarantees offered are irrespective of the computational power of the adversary.
Three themes are developed in parallel throughout the dissertation. The first theme explores the relationship between cooperation and secrecy. In wireless networks, cooperation from intermediate relay nodes are essential for facilitating long range communications. This dissertation considers a series of network models where the information from a source to a destination needs to be kept confidential from intermediate relays. Four different network models with untrusted relay nodes are considered: the three-node relay channel, the two-hop link, the two-way relay channel and the multi-hop line network. These models are studied for relays that are honest but curious. That is, the relay nodes are legitimate nodes with lower security clearance, that willingly carry out the designated relay schemes. Secrecy capacity lower and upper bounds for each channel model are found and cases where secrecy capacity can be found are identified. Next the two-hop link is studied where the relay turns malicious in that it can manipulate the signals being relayed and carry out a Byzantine attack. In this case, two requirements must be satisfied simultaneously: The message must be kept confidential from the relay node, and, any modification carried out by the relay node must be detected reliably by the legitimate parties. The dissertation shows that both requirements can be fulfilled for this model with arbitrarily small overhead.
The next two themes developed in this dissertation serve as the technical foundation for the first theme. One establishes the foundation for providing secrecy using structured codes. Traditionally, the achievability proofs for information theoretic secrecy rely on Shannon’s random codebook generation argument in which the codebook does not exhibit structure. In this dissertation, it is shown that by imposing structure requirements in random codebook generation, higher rates for secure communication can be achieved than known results obtained using the conventional approach. This dissertation develops the necessary tool and general methodology for computing the secrecy rate when a nested lattice structure is used in codebook generation. Two results are presented that rely on this foundation. First, it is proved that, for a class of Gaussian channel models with interference and secrecy constraints, structured codes outperform Gaussian signaling at medium to high SNR. Second, this tool is used to develop a strong secrecy scheme for the two-hop link with an untrusted relay, which in turn is the centerpiece of the Byzantine detection scheme developed in this dissertation.
The third theme is methods of proving strong secrecy. Information theoretic secrecy results often rely on the weak secrecy constraint which provides only asymptotic guarantees with respect to the information rate leaked to the adversary. As this would likely be insufficient in a practical system, a non-asymptotic, strong secrecy guarantee must be sought. More often than not, weak secrecy rates can be strengthened to strong secrecy rates in a straightforward manner, leading back to the justification of proving weak secrecy only. This dissertation challenges this conventional wisdom and identifies two cases where this approach does not follow. In both cases, direct strong secrecy proofs are established. These are: the two-hop link with a Byzantine relay, and models with arbitrarily varying eavesdropper channel considered in the last chapter of this dissertation.
The latter model is motivated by the need to bring the theory of providing unconditional secrecy guarantees closer to practice. In particular, the dissertation addresses the case where the channel that the adversary (eavesdropper) experiences is completely unknown to the legitimate parties. To do so, a multiple input-multiple output (MIMO) wiretap channel is considered where the eavesdropper’s channel is arbitrarily varying. A coding theorem is derived for with this setting. The secrecy rate obtained from this coding theorem is tight in terms of secure degree of freedom, which is a high SNR characterization of the secrecy capacity. In addition, the secure degree of freedom regions for the MIMO multiple access (MAC) wiretap channel and the MIMO broadcast wiretap channel are derived when the legitimate nodes have the same number of antennas, identifying the high SNR characterization of the fundamental transmission limits for these models.
We are in the midst of wireless revolution, and increasing demand continues for wireless applications.This explosive growth, of wireless communications and services, inevitably renders security into a challenging quality of service constraint that must be accounted for in the network design.The state of the art methods in combating the security threats are usually founded on cryptographic approaches.These techniques typically assume limited computational resources at adversaries, are usually derived from unproven assumptions, and most of the time do not offer a measurable security notion.Information theoretic security, on the other hand, eliminates the aforementioned limitations of the cryptographic techniques at the physical layer of communication systems.In this thesis, we concentrate on both the theoretical and the practical aspects of physical layer security.We first start by analyzing elemental interference networks, in particular, two-user channels with an adversary.The problem here is to characterize the fundamental limits on secure transmission rates.Towards this end, we devise coding schemes, forming inner bounds to the capacity region, and compare the achievable rates with outer bounds.This analysis is useful to explore microscopic gains that can be leveraged by the different coding schemes, and our analysis shows that the inherent interference can in fact be exploited to cooperatively confuse the eavesdropping node.4.4 There are ⌈δ log n⌉ number of disjoint highways within each rectangle of size (κ log nǫ) × √ n.The legitimate users in the slab, denoted by dotted lines, of the rectangle is served by the highway denoted with red bold line. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Wireless systems are susceptible to eavesdropping as an unwelcome result of the broadcast nature of the wireless medium. Fortunately, the wireless medium also provides endowments including the temporal dispersion, the capability of signal superposition and other properties, to facilitate defending against eavesdropping. The focus of the thesis is to provide schemes for utilizing these properties at the physical layer and their performance analysis from an information-theoretic secrecy perspective. The work is based on Wyner's results on the wire-tap channel, in which the transmission between two legitimate users (Alice and Bob) is eavesdropped upon by Eve. The secrecy level is measured by the equivocation rate at Eve. The system performance is measured by the secrecy capacity. This is the maximum rate at which a message can be sent from Alice to Bob, while constraining the equivocation rate at Eve equal to the communication rate, and thus ensuring that Eve cannot deduce any useful information asymptotically. First, the scenario where a secret message needs to be delivered to the intended receiver within a given delay constraint and without the knowledge of the channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter is considered. In particular, hybrid automatic retransmission request (HARQ) protocols are revisited for a block-fading wire-tap channel via a joint consideration of channel coding, secrecy coding, and retransmission protocols. Two secure HARQ protocols: a repetition time diversity (RTD) scheme with maximal-ratio combining, and an incremental redundancy (INR) scheme based on ratecompatible Wyner secrecy codes are analyzed via an outage-based formulation. The throughput of RTD and INR protocols under probabilistic outage requirements is derived. Asymptotic analysis and numerical computations are given to demonstrate both the benefits of HARQ protocols and the tradeoff between reliability and confidentiality in delay-constrained communications. Second, the effects of interference on information-theoretic secret communication is considered. More specifically, the wiretap channel with a helping interferer (WT-HI) is proposed and studied. Here, an interferer, which does not know the confidential message, helps in ensuring the secrecy of the message by sending independent signals. Achievable secrecy rates and upper bounds on the secrecy capacity are given for both discrete memoryless and Gaussian channels. Interference has conventionally been regarded as a harmful phenomenon that leads to decreasing the rate and the reliability performance of wireless systems. In this work, it is shown that interference can be exploited to assist wireless secrecy. Lastly, the problem of secret key generation over fading channels, in which there exists an additional authenticated, public and error-free feedback channel from Bob to Alice, is considered. A key generation scheme consisting of a communication phase and a key-generation phase is presented. The communication phase is based on layered broadcast coding, which adapts the decoded rate at Bob to the actual channel state without requiring CSI available at Alice. The key-generation phase is based on the messages decoded by Bob after the communication phase and the public feedback. The achievable secrecy key rate and the optimal power distribution over coded layers for maximizing the secrecy key rate are characterized. Theoretical and numerical results show that the broadcast approach outperforms the single-level-coding based approach significantly, and hence demonstrate the role of introducing self-interference in facilitating secret-key generation over slowly fading channels when transmit CSI is not available.