As the number of connected devices and the importance of mobile communications continue to increase, a greater emphasis must be placed on security. Due to the broadcast nature of wireless communications, wireless networks are very exposed to eavesdropping. While this can be addressed above the physical layers using encryption, this still allows the attacker to receive the message and future work may allow decryption. Physical layer security is an approach to security which exploits the wireless channel to prevent the attacker from decoding the message. This thesis examines the use of friendly jamming, in which some nodes in a network broadcast white noise in order to degrade the channel between the legitimate transmitter and the eavesdropper. We address two problems related to the use of friendly jamming to improve physical layer security. The first problem is routing a signal through a network while using the remaining nodes as jammers to secure the signal. This is solved as two convex problems of allocating power to the jammers and routing the signal using those jammers to secure the transmission. This is shown to be a feasible method to increase security in a network. The second problem is estimating the self-interference channel (SIC) without using a calibration period for full-duplex jamming receivers. As the transmitter cannot transmit while the receiver estimates its SIC using a half duplex pilot signal, eliminating the calibration period can represent a significant capacity gain. Estimating the channel while receiving the desired signal causes it to act as an additional noise source, but this is shown to be overcome through the use of long estimation times. Our proposed scheme is able to increase the secrecy capacity of the system over that of calibration based estimation.
As the number of connected devices and the importance of mobile communications continue to increase, a greater emphasis must be placed on security. Due to the broadcast nature of wireless communications, wireless networks are very exposed to eavesdropping. While this can be addressed above the physical layers using encryption, this still allows the attacker to receive the message and future work may allow decryption. Physical layer security is an approach to security which exploits the wireless channel to prevent the attacker from decoding the message. This thesis examines the use of friendly jamming, in which some nodes in a network broadcast white noise in order to degrade the channel between the legitimate transmitter and the eavesdropper. We address two problems related to the use of friendly jamming to improve physical layer security. The first problem is routing a signal through a network while using the remaining nodes as jammers to secure the signal. This is solved as two convex problems of allocating power to the jammers and routing the signal using those jammers to secure the transmission. This is shown to be a feasible method to increase security in a network. The second problem is estimating the self-interference channel (SIC) without using a calibration period for full-duplex jamming receivers. As the transmitter cannot transmit while the receiver estimates its SIC using a half duplex pilot signal, eliminating the calibration period can represent a significant capacity gain. Estimating the channel while receiving the desired signal causes it to act as an additional noise source, but this is shown to be overcome through the use of long estimation times. Our proposed scheme is able to increase the secrecy capacity of the system over that of calibration based estimation.
Wireless communication is highly susceptible to eavesdropping attacks where a malicious user can exploit the broadcast nature of the wireless signals to eavesdrop on confidential information. At the physical layer, there are multiple possible avenues to utilize the inherent randomness of the wireless transmission medium to achieve secure communication. One of the lucrative possibilities is to use the channel state information (CSI) to establish a secure communication link because it is vital in decoding the received signal at the transmitter. This technique is commonly referred to as discriminatory channel estimation (DCE) where the channel estimation performance is intentionally degraded at the eavesdropper as compared to the legitimate nodes to achieve secure communication.In this thesis, we capitalize on full-duplex (FD) transmissions to transmit the pilot signals to obscure the channel estimates from the eavesdropper. FD transmission severely limits the estimation performance at the eavesdropper while the legitimate nodes can acquire robust estimates. The secrecy of channel estimates from the eavesdropper provides a bandwidth-efficient security technique as the channel estimation requires less bandwidth than the data transmission. We have presented the achievable secrecy capacity analysis along with the simulation analysis to illustrate the performance improvements achieved by the proposed novel secure channel estimation. In this thesis, we also study the impact of artificial noise (AN) to improve the secrecy achieved by the use of FD transmission of pilot signals. For a strategically located eavesdropper, we have presented novel DCE techniques where AN signals are transmitted along with pilot signals using FD transmission. The AN signals confuse the nearby eavesdropper to establish a secure and robust communication link. We have also presented novel local adaptive power allocation algorithms, where each legitimate node performs power allocation in the absence of statistical channel characteristics regarding the eavesdropping channel. We have provided an in-depth simulation analysis including a location-based simulation analysis to illustrate that the secrecy performance achieved by the proposed DCE techniques. The simulation results indicate that the proposed DCE techniques achieve robust secure communication against a strategically located eavesdropper: while the other DCE techniques are unable to avoid the leakage of information to the eavesdropper
This work aims at addressing two critical security issues residing in the physical layer of wireless networks, namely intelligent jamming and eavesdropping. In the first two chapters we study the problem of jamming in a fixed-rate transmission system with fading, under the general assumption that the jammer has no knowledge about either the codebook used by the legitimate communication terminals, or the source’s output. Both transmitter and jammer are subject to power constraints which can be enforced over each codeword (peak) or over all codewords (average). All our jamming problems are formulated as zero-sum games, having the probability of outage as pay-off function and power control functions as strategies. We provide a comprehensive coverage of these problems, under fast and slow fading, peak and average power constraints, pure and mixed strategies, with and without channel state information (CSI) feedback. Contributions to the eavesdropping problem include a novel feedback scheme for transmitting secret messages between two legitimate parties, over an eavesdropped communication link, presented in Chapter 4. Relative to Wyner’s traditional encoding scheme, our feedback-based encoding often yields larger rate-equivocation regions and achievable secrecy rates. More importantly, by exploiting the channel randomness inherent in the feedback channels, our scheme achieves a strictly positive secrecy rate even when the eavesdropper’s channel is less noisy than the legitimate receiver’s channel. In Chapter 5 we study the problem of active eavesdropping in fast fading channels. The active eavesdropper is a more powerful adversary than the classical eavesdropper. It can choose between two functional modes: eavesdropping the transmission between the legitimate parties (Ex mode), and jamming it (Jx mode) – the active eavesdropper cannot function in full duplex mode. We consider two scenarios: the best-case scenario, when the transmitter knows the eavesdropper’s strategy in advance – and hence can adaptively choose an encoding strategy – and the worst-case scenario, when the active eavesdropper can choose its strategy based on the legitimate transmitter-receiver pair’s strategy. For the second scenario, we introduce a novel encoding scheme, based on very limited and unprotected feedback – the Block-Markov Wyner (BMW) encoding scheme – which outperforms any schemes currently available.
Information secrecy is achievable in a broadcast wireless communication system when the adversary channel witness a greater disruption as against the main channel. The secrecy level need to be enhanced as the adversary terminal can use advance method to eaves drop the hidden message being exchanged between the two legitimate communicating partners. The use of relay- assisted node in information-theoretic approach at the physical layer security has been widely researched into but they are mostly operate in a half-duplex mode (HD). With the advancement in electronic technology, the use of a single antenna in full duplex mode (FD) is possible. We explore this property in enhancing the security of a broadcast wireless system at the physical layer. In this work, the transmitter generates artificial noise (AN) while the legitimate receiver(LR) also transmits another jamming noise (JN) from its antenna to unintended receiver (UR) node. The effect of these multiple noises are examined on the secrecy capacity and probability outage capacity on the UR channel. Mathematical analysis and the numerical simulation results show improvement in channel secrecy capacity over the conventional approaches.
Information secrecy is achievable in a broadcast wireless communication system when the adversary channel witness a greater disruption as against the main channel. The secrecy level need to be enhanced as the adversary terminal can use advance method to eaves drop the hidden message being exchanged between the two legitimate communicating partners. The use of relay- assisted node in information-theoretic approach at the physical layer security has been widely researched into but they are mostly operate in a half-duplex mode (HD). With the advancement in electronic technology, the use of a single antenna in full duplex mode (FD) is possible. We explore this property in enhancing the security of a broadcast wireless system at the physical layer. In this work, the transmitter generates artificial noise (AN) while the legitimate receiver(LR) also transmits another jamming noise (JN) from its antenna to unintended receiver (UR) node. The effect of these multiple noises are examined on the secrecy capacity and probability outage capacity on the UR channel. Mathematical analysis and the numerical simulation results show improvement in channel secrecy capacity over the conventional approaches.
Cooperative communications is obviously an evolution in wireless networks due to its noticeable advantages such as increasing the coverage as well as combating fading and shadowing effects. However, the broadcast characteristic of a wireless medium which is exploited in cooperative communications leads to a variety of security vulnerabilities. As cooperative communication networks are globally expanded, they expose to security attacks and threats more than ever. Primarily, researchers have focused on upper layers of network architectures to meet the requirements for secure cooperative transmission while the upper-layer security solutions are incapable of combating a number of security threats, e.g., jamming attacks. To address this issue, physical-layer security has been recommended as a complementary solution in the literature. In this thesis, physical layer attacks of the cooperative communication systems are studied, and corresponding security techniques including cooperative jamming, beamforming and diversity approaches are investigated. In addition, a novel security solution for a two-hop decode-and-forward relaying system is presented where the transmitters insert a random phase shift to the modulated data of each hop. The random phase shift is created based on a shared secret among communicating entities. Thus, the injected phase shift confuses the eavesdropper and secrecy capacity improves. Furthermore, a cooperative jamming strategy for multi-hop decode-and-forward relaying systems is presented where multiple non-colluding illegitimate nodes can overhear the communication. The jamming signal is created by the transmitter of each hop while being sent with the primary signal. The jamming signal is known at the intended receiver as it is according to a secret common knowledge between the communicating entities. Hence, artificial noise misleads the eavesdroppers, and decreases their signal-to-noise-ratio. As a result, secrecy capacity of the system is improved. Finally, power allocation among friendly jamming and main signal is proposed to ensure that suggested scheme enhances secrecy.
As the technology and computing power advance day by day, physical layer security in wireless communications gains more importance. It allows the security of wireless communications based on information theoretical guarantees without the need for cryptography. One important practical challenge for physical layer security arises from the fact that no information about the passive eavesdroppers is available to the legitimate nodes. Without such information, optimizing the transmission parameters has always been a difficult task. In this study we aim to address various challenging aspects about this issue and propose a new perspective into the analysis of secrecy with a focus on jamming. We start from the case of eavesdropper's channel state information (CSI) known to users in a three-node single-antenna multi-subcarrier network and present an improved optimization algorithm compared to previous methods. Then we expand our horizon to the case of multiple-antenna nodes with eavesdropper's CSI unknown to users. We investigate a secure wireless communication scheme which combines two of the most effective strategies to combat eavesdropping, namely mixing information with artificial noise at the transmitter and jamming from a full-duplex receiver. While such setup has been investigated in related works, new and important insights are revealed in this study. We investigate the design of optimal jamming parameters to achieve higher secrecy.We then derive a closed-form expression for asymptotic normalized instantaneous secrecy rate of our model. Based on the results of the asymptotic analysis, we propose an alternative less complex tractable optimization problem for the design of optimal transmission parameters to achieve higher secrecy. We show that even with the optimal parameters, secrecy is compromised if Eve is able to increase her number of antennas. To address this issue, we provide a comprehensive analysis of a new scheme called anti-eavesdropping channel estimation (ANECE) which prevents Eve from acquiring accurate channel estimations. We show that the usage of such scheme, makes it extremely hard for Eve to drive secrecy to zero. Numerical analyses and simulations are presented to support the arguments made in this study.We then derive a closed-form expression for asymptotic normalized instantaneous secrecy rate of our model. Based on the results of the asymptotic analysis, we propose an alternative less complex tractable optimization problem for the design of optimal transmission parameters to achieve higher secrecy. We show that even with the optimal parameters, secrecy is compromised if Eve is able to increase her number of antennas. To address this issue, we provide a comprehensive analysis of a new scheme called anti-eavesdropping channel estimation (ANECE) which prevents Eve from acquiring accurate channel estimations. We show that the usage of such scheme, makes it extremely hard for Eve to drive secrecy to zero. Numerical analyses and simulations are presented to support the arguments made in this study.We then derive a closed-form expression for asymptotic normalized instantaneous secrecy rate of our model. Based on the results of the asymptotic analysis, we propose an alternative less complex tractable optimization problem for the design of optimal transmission parameters to achieve higher secrecy. We show that even with the optimal parameters, secrecy is compromised if Eve is able to increase her number of antennas. To address this issue, we provide a comprehensive analysis of a new scheme called anti-eavesdropping channel estimation (ANECE) which prevents Eve from acquiring accurate channel estimations. We show that the usage of such scheme makes it extremely hard for Eve to drive secrecy to zero. Numerical analyses and simulations are presented to support the arguments made in this study.