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Wireless Physical Layer Security: An Information Theoretic Approach

O. Ozan Koyluoglu

Published Jan 1, 2010• 3 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Related papers

Wireless Physical Layer Security: Towards Practical Assumptions and Requirements

Biao He

The current research on physical layer security is far from implementations in practical networks, arguably due to impractical assumptions in the literature and the limited applicability of physical layer security. Aiming to reduce the gap between theory and practice, this thesis focuses on wireless physical layer security towards practical assumptions and requirements. In the first half of the thesis, we reduce the dependence of physical layer security on impractical assumptions. The secrecy enhancements and analysis based on impractical assumptions cannot lead to any true guarantee of secrecy in practical networks. The current study of physical layer security was often based on the idealized assumption of perfect channel knowledge on both legitimate users and eavesdroppers. We study the impact of channel estimation errors on secure transmission designs. We investigate the practical scenarios where both the transmitter and the receiver have imperfect channel state information (CSI). Our results show how the optimal transmission design and the achievable throughput vary with the amount of knowledge on the eavesdropper's channel. Apart from the assumption of perfect CSI, the analysis of physical layer security often ideally assumed the number of eavesdropper antennas to be known. We develop an innovative approach to study secure communication systems without knowing the number of eavesdropper antennas by introducing the concept of spatial constraint into physical layer security. That is, the eavesdropper is assumed to have a limited spatial region to place (possibly an infinite number of) antennas. We show that a non-zero secrecy rate is achievable with the help of a friendly jammer, even if the eavesdropper places an infinite number of antennas in its spatial region. In the second half of the thesis, we improve the applicability of physical layer security. The current physical layer security techniques to achieve confidential broadcasting were limited to application in single-cell systems. The primary challenge to achieve confidential broadcasting in the multi-cell network is to deal with not only the inter-cell but also the intra-cell information leakage and interference. To tackle this challenge, we design linear precoders performing confidential broadcasting in multi-cell networks. We optimize the precoder designs to maximize the secrecy sum rate with based on the large-system analysis. Finally, we improve the applicability of physical layer security from a fundamental aspect. The analysis of physical layer security based on the existing secrecy metric was often not applicable in practical networks. We propose new metrics for evaluating the secrecy of transmissions over fading channels to address the practical limitations of using existing secrecy metrics for such evaluations. The first metric establishes a link between the concept of secrecy outage and the eavesdropper's ability to decode confidential messages. The second metric provides an error-probability-based secrecy metric which is often used for the practical implementation of secure wireless systems. The third metric characterizes how much or how fast the confidential information is leaked to the eavesdropper. We show that the proposed secrecy metrics enable one to appropriately design secure communication systems with different views on how secrecy is measured.

•Jan 1, 2016•1 citation

Information-theoretic Secrecy in Multi-user Channels

Ersen Ekrem

Inherent openness of the wireless medium imposes stronger challenges on the security of wireless communications. Information-theoretic security addresses these challenges at the physical layer by using tools from wireless communication theory, signal processing and information theory. In information-theoretic security, physical layer communication is intelligently designed to exploit the characteristics of the wireless medium, such as fading, interference, cooperation, and multi-dimensional signaling, in order to provide or improve security. In this dissertation, we study the security of several fundamental wireless network configurations from an information-theoretic perspective. First, we study the Gaussian multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wiretap channel. In this channel, the transmitter sends a common message to both the legitimate user and the eavesdropper. In addition to the common message, a private message is sent only to the legitimate user, which needs to be kept hidden as much as possible from the eavesdropper. We obtain the entire capacity-equivocation region for this channel model. In particular, we show the sufficiency of jointly Gaussian auxiliary random variables and channel input to evaluate the existing single-letter description of the capacity-equivocation region due to Csiszar-Korner. Next, we study the secure broadcasting problem, where a transmitter wants to have secure communication with multiple legitimate users in the presence of an external eavesdropper. We study several special cases of the secure broadcasting problem. First, we consider the degraded multi-receiver wiretap channel, and establish its secrecy capacity region. Second, we consider the parallel less noisy multi-receiver wiretap channel, and obtain its common message secrecy capacity and sum secrecy capacity. Third, we consider the parallel degraded multi-receiver wiretap channel for the two-user and two-sub-channel case, and obtain its entire secrecy capacity region. Finally, we consider a parallel channel model with two sub-channels, where the transmitter can use only one of the subchannels at any time, and characterize its secrecy capacity region. Then, we study the two-user Gaussian MIMO broadcast channel with common and confidential messages. In this channel model, the transmitter sends a common message to both users, and a confidential message to each user which needs to be kept perfectly secret from the other user. We obtain the entire capacity region of this channel. We also explore the connections between this channel model and its non-confidential counterpart, i.e., the Gaussian MIMO broadcast channel with common and private message. Next, we consider the Gaussian MIMO multi-receiver wiretap channel and obtain its secrecy capacity region for the most general case. We first show that even for the single-input single-output (SISO) case, existing converse techniques fall short of proving the secrecy capacity region, to emphasize the need for a new proof technique, which we develop by using the relationships between the Fisher information and the differential entropy. Using this new proof technique, we obtain the secrecy capacity region of the degraded MIMO channel. We then establish the secrecy capacity region of the general MIMO channel by using the channel enhancement technique in conjunction with the capacity result we obtained for the degraded MIMO channel. For the general MIMO channel, we show that dirty-paper coding (DPC) combined with stochastic encoding attains the entire secrecy capacity region. Then, we study the multi-receiver wiretap channel for a more general scenario, where, in addition to confidential messages, the transmitter sends public messages to the legitimate users, on which there are no secrecy constraints. First, we consider the degraded discrete memoryless channel, and obtain inner and outer bounds for the capacity region. These inner and outer bounds match for certain cases, providing the capacity region. Second, we obtain an inner bound for the general discrete memoryless channel by using Marton's inner bound. Third, we consider the degraded Gaussian MIMO channel, and show that jointly Gaussian auxiliary random variables and channel input are sufficient to exhaust the inner and outer bounds. Finally, we provide an inner bound for the capacity region of the general Gaussian MIMO channel. Next, we focus on the multiple access wiretap (MAC-WT) channel whose capacity region is unknown. We consider a special class of MAC-WT channels which we call the weak eavesdropper class, where each user's link to the legitimate receiver is stronger than its link to the eavesdropper. For this class of channels, we develop an outer bound for the secrecy capacity region, which partially matches the achievable region in an n-letter form. We evaluate a looser version of our outer bound for the Gaussian case, and show that our outer bound is within 0.5 bits/channel use of the achievable rates along the individual secrecy rates for all weak eavesdropper Gaussian MAC-WT. Then, we investigate the effects of user cooperation on the secrecy of broadcast channels by considering the cooperative relay broadcast channel (CRBC). We propose an achievable scheme that combines Marton's coding scheme for broadcast channels and Cover and El Gamal's compress-and-forward (CAF) scheme for relay channels. For the Gaussian CRBC, we show that both users can have positive secrecy rates, which is not possible for scalar Gaussian broadcast channels without cooperation. We further investigate the effects of user cooperation on secrecy by considering the multiple access channel with generalized feedback (MAC-GF), which can be viewed as the MAC-dual of the CRBC. We propose a CAF-based achievable secrecy rate region for the MAC-GF. Specializing our results to a Gaussian MAC-GF, we present numerical results which demonstrate that cooperation can improve secrecy for the MAC-GF. Next, we study the two-user one-eavesdropper discrete memoryless compound wiretap channel, and provide the best known lower bound for the secrecy capacity of this compound channel. We evaluate this achievable secrecy rate for the Gaussian MIMO case by using DPC. We show that this achievable secrecy rate achieves at least half of the secrecy capacity of this Gaussian MIMO compound wiretap channel, and also attains the secrecy capacity when the eavesdropper is degraded with respect to one of the two users. Then, we study the degraded compound multi-receiver wiretap channel (DCMRWC), which, in addition to a group of eavesdroppers, has two groups of users, namely the stronger group and the weaker group. We study two different communication scenarios for this channel. In the first scenario, there is only one eavesdropper, and the transmitter sends a confidential message to each group of legitimate users while keeping both messages secret from the eavesdropper. In the second scenario, we study the DCMRWC with layered messages without any restriction on the number of eavesdroppers. For both scenarios, we obtain the secrecy capacity region for the discrete memoryless channel, the parallel channel, and the Gaussian parallel channel. For the Gaussian MIMO channel, we obtain the secrecy capacity region when there is only one user in the second group. Next, we study the two-user fading broadcast channel and obtain its ergodic secrecy capacity region. We show that, thanks to fading, both users can have simultaneous secure communication with the transmitter, although this is not possible in the scalar non-fading Gaussian broadcast channel where only one user can have secure communication. This simultaneous secrecy of both users is achieved by an opportunistic communication scheme, in which, at each time instant, the transmitter communicates with the user having a better channel gain. Then, we study the secure lossy transmission of a vector Gaussian source to a legitimate user in the presence of an eavesdropper, where both the legitimate user and the eavesdropper have vector Gaussian side information. We obtain an outer bound for the rate, equivocation and distortion region. Moreover, we obtain the maximum equivocation at the eavesdropper when there is no constraint on the transmission rate. By using this maximum equivocation result, we show two facts. First, for this problem, in general, Wyner-Ziv scheme is suboptimal, although, it is optimal in the absence of an eavesdropper. And, second, even when there is no transmission rate constraint, an uncoded transmission scheme is suboptimal; the presence of an eavesdropper necessitates the use of a coded scheme to attain the maximum equivocation. Finally, we revisit the secure lossy source coding problem. In all works on this problem, either the equivocation of the source at the eavesdropper or the equivocation of the legitimate user's reconstruction of the source at the eavesdropper is used to measure secrecy. We first propose the relative equivocation of the source at the eavesdropper with respect to the legitimate user as a new secrecy measure. We argue that this new secrecy measure is the one that corresponds to the natural generalization of the equivocation in a wiretap channel to the context of secure lossy source coding. Under this new secrecy measure, we provide a single-letter description of the rate, relative equivocation and distortion region, as well as its specializations to degraded and reversely degraded cases. We investigate the relationships between the optimal scheme that attains this region and the Wyner-Ziv scheme.

•Jan 1, 2012•0 citations

Physical Layer Security Jamming: Theoretical Limits and Practical Designs in Wireless Networks

Kanapathippillai Cumanan, Hong Xing, Peng Xu +5 more

Physical layer security has been recently recognized as a promising new design paradigm to provide security in wireless networks. In addition to the existing conventional cryptographic methods, physical layer security exploits the dynamics of fading channels to enhance secured wireless links. In this approach, jamming plays a key role by generating noise signals to confuse the potential eavesdroppers, and significantly improves quality and reliability of secure communications between legitimate terminals. This article presents theoretical limits and practical designs of jamming approaches for physical layer security. In particular, the theoretical limits explore the achievable secrecy rates of user cooperation-based jamming whilst the centralized and game theoretic-based precoding techniques are reviewed for practical implementations. In addition, the emerging wireless energy harvesting techniques are exploited to harvest the required energy to transmit jamming signals. Future directions of these approaches and the associated research challenges are also briefly outlined.

arXiv:1701.05764•IEEE Access•Dec 17, 2016•91 citations

Security by similarity: information-theoretic secrecy and decentralized detection algorithms for wireless networks

Mohammadi, Jafar

The broadcasting attribute of the wireless communication channel poses severe security vulnerabilities since any adversary node in the range of reception is able to listen as well as to disrupt the ongoing communication. This dissertation considers the problem of security from two different perspectives: The information-theoretic approach at the physical-layer to avert eavesdropping and centralized and decentralized detection algorithms to detect the presence of a jammer. In the first part, we apply the available tools in information-theoretic security to study the achievable secrecy rate region of the following channel models: the discrete memoryless broadcast channel with two confidential messages for each of the two users, the discrete memoryless interference channel with two confidential messages, and the discrete memoryless untrusted relay channel with decode-and-forward (DF) relays (DMURC). For the first two scenarios, we extend the existing results on the weak secrecy to the strong secrecy criterion. Owing to its definition, the strong secrecy has a practical interpretation, whereas weak secrecy provides asymptotic results. In the third scenario, we apply a precoder and a post-decoder in addition to the common channel coding required to provide secrecy, to deal with the dishonest nature of the relays. An achievable secrecy rate region for DMURC is established. We revisit the untrusted relay scenario with some different assumptions: with Gaussian channel and both DF and amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying. The objective, however, is to develop a secure scheme that allows for weaker secrecy than Shannon’s perfect secrecy but with a higher transmission rate. We propose a new measure for secrecy, referred to as a-secrecy (0 = a = 1), where a = 1 represents the perfect secrecy, whereas a = 0 denotes no secrecy at all. We suggest using a cross-layer design where at the physical layer the information-theoretic security is applied and some higher layer scheme, e.g. secure network coding, allows to obtain any point in the transmission rate and a-secrecy trade-off. The analysis of performance achievable by the scheme leads to a mixed-integer optimization problem. Moreover, we study the problem asymptotically to gain some insights. Active security attacks are the main focus of the second part of this thesis. We study the problem of joint jamming detection and spectrum sensing. The problem arises in the cognitive radio scenario, where the secondary users (SU)s sensing the channel to detect the primary users (PU)s. We model the problem as a multiple-hypothesis testing problem where the observations from the SUs experience spatial channel correlation. The optimal test statistic is derived according to Neyman-Pearson lemma. We derive the exact probability distribution of the test statistic in terms of Meijer’s G-functions. We consider a practical application where the SUs’ power efficiency is analyzed. This leads to a non-convex optimization problem that addresses the power efficiency and detection performance trade-off. The detection performance in the exact form is too complex to be handled analytically, therefore, we consider the asymptotic regime. Two heuristics are proposed to tackle the optimization problem; one based on the projected gradient method and the other one is motivated by the KKT conditions. All of the algorithms mentioned above are designed for a centralized system. Taking into account the susceptibility of centralized systems to the Byzantine attacks, we study the decentralization of eigenvalue-based detection algorithms in the last chapter of this thesis. We use generic consensus algorithm as a building block in decentralizing an eigenvalue estimator algorithm. The algorithm estimates all eigenvalues of a covariance matrix, which is available only partly to each node. We further modify the algorithm for two special practical scenarios, including the channel probing for admission control problem.

•Jan 1, 2017•0 citations

Physical and cross-layer security enhancement and resource allocation for wireless networks

Zhi Jun Ding, Muhammad Shafi Al Bashar

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.

ProQuest LLC eBooks•Jan 1, 2011•1 citation

Information theory enabled secure wireless communication, key generation and authentication

Onur Güngör

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 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

•Jan 1, 2014•1 citation
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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The current research on physical layer security is far from implementations in practical networks, arguably due to impractical assumptions in the literature and the limited applicability of physical layer security. Aiming to reduce the gap between theory and practice, this thesis focuses on wireless physical layer security towards practical assumptions and requirements. In the first half of the thesis, we reduce the dependence of physical layer security on impractical assumptions. The secrecy enhancements and analysis based on impractical assumptions cannot lead to any true guarantee of secrecy in practical networks. The current study of physical layer security was often based on the idealized assumption of perfect channel knowledge on both legitimate users and eavesdroppers. We study the impact of channel estimation errors on secure transmission designs. We investigate the practical scenarios where both the transmitter and the receiver have imperfect channel state information (CSI). Our results show how the optimal transmission design and the achievable throughput vary with the amount of knowledge on the eavesdropper's channel. Apart from the assumption of perfect CSI, the analysis of physical layer security often ideally assumed the number of eavesdropper antennas to be known. We develop an innovative approach to study secure communication systems without knowing the number of eavesdropper antennas by introducing the concept of spatial constraint into physical layer security. That is, the eavesdropper is assumed to have a limited spatial region to place (possibly an infinite number of) antennas. We show that a non-zero secrecy rate is achievable with the help of a friendly jammer, even if the eavesdropper places an infinite number of antennas in its spatial region. In the second half of the thesis, we improve the applicability of physical layer security. The current physical layer security techniques to achieve confidential broadcasting were limited to application in single-cell systems. The primary challenge to achieve confidential broadcasting in the multi-cell network is to deal with not only the inter-cell but also the intra-cell information leakage and interference. To tackle this challenge, we design linear precoders performing confidential broadcasting in multi-cell networks. We optimize the precoder designs to maximize the secrecy sum rate with based on the large-system analysis. Finally, we improve the applicability of physical layer security from a fundamental aspect. The analysis of physical layer security based on the existing secrecy metric was often not applicable in practical networks. We propose new metrics for evaluating the secrecy of transmissions over fading channels to address the practical limitations of using existing secrecy metrics for such evaluations. The first metric establishes a link between the concept of secrecy outage and the eavesdropper's ability to decode confidential messages. The second metric provides an error-probability-based secrecy metric which is often used for the practical implementation of secure wireless systems. The third metric characterizes how much or how fast the confidential information is leaked to the eavesdropper. We show that the proposed secrecy metrics enable one to appropriately design secure communication systems with different views on how secrecy is measured.
Inherent openness of the wireless medium imposes stronger challenges on the security of wireless communications. Information-theoretic security addresses these challenges at the physical layer by using tools from wireless communication theory, signal processing and information theory. In information-theoretic security, physical layer communication is intelligently designed to exploit the characteristics of the wireless medium, such as fading, interference, cooperation, and multi-dimensional signaling, in order to provide or improve security. In this dissertation, we study the security of several fundamental wireless network configurations from an information-theoretic perspective. First, we study the Gaussian multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wiretap channel. In this channel, the transmitter sends a common message to both the legitimate user and the eavesdropper. In addition to the common message, a private message is sent only to the legitimate user, which needs to be kept hidden as much as possible from the eavesdropper. We obtain the entire capacity-equivocation region for this channel model. In particular, we show the sufficiency of jointly Gaussian auxiliary random variables and channel input to evaluate the existing single-letter description of the capacity-equivocation region due to Csiszar-Korner. Next, we study the secure broadcasting problem, where a transmitter wants to have secure communication with multiple legitimate users in the presence of an external eavesdropper. We study several special cases of the secure broadcasting problem. First, we consider the degraded multi-receiver wiretap channel, and establish its secrecy capacity region. Second, we consider the parallel less noisy multi-receiver wiretap channel, and obtain its common message secrecy capacity and sum secrecy capacity. Third, we consider the parallel degraded multi-receiver wiretap channel for the two-user and two-sub-channel case, and obtain its entire secrecy capacity region. Finally, we consider a parallel channel model with two sub-channels, where the transmitter can use only one of the subchannels at any time, and characterize its secrecy capacity region. Then, we study the two-user Gaussian MIMO broadcast channel with common and confidential messages. In this channel model, the transmitter sends a common message to both users, and a confidential message to each user which needs to be kept perfectly secret from the other user. We obtain the entire capacity region of this channel. We also explore the connections between this channel model and its non-confidential counterpart, i.e., the Gaussian MIMO broadcast channel with common and private message. Next, we consider the Gaussian MIMO multi-receiver wiretap channel and obtain its secrecy capacity region for the most general case. We first show that even for the single-input single-output (SISO) case, existing converse techniques fall short of proving the secrecy capacity region, to emphasize the need for a new proof technique, which we develop by using the relationships between the Fisher information and the differential entropy. Using this new proof technique, we obtain the secrecy capacity region of the degraded MIMO channel. We then establish the secrecy capacity region of the general MIMO channel by using the channel enhancement technique in conjunction with the capacity result we obtained for the degraded MIMO channel. For the general MIMO channel, we show that dirty-paper coding (DPC) combined with stochastic encoding attains the entire secrecy capacity region. Then, we study the multi-receiver wiretap channel for a more general scenario, where, in addition to confidential messages, the transmitter sends public messages to the legitimate users, on which there are no secrecy constraints. First, we consider the degraded discrete memoryless channel, and obtain inner and outer bounds for the capacity region. These inner and outer bounds match for certain cases, providing the capacity region. Second, we obtain an inner bound for the general discrete memoryless channel by using Marton's inner bound. Third, we consider the degraded Gaussian MIMO channel, and show that jointly Gaussian auxiliary random variables and channel input are sufficient to exhaust the inner and outer bounds. Finally, we provide an inner bound for the capacity region of the general Gaussian MIMO channel. Next, we focus on the multiple access wiretap (MAC-WT) channel whose capacity region is unknown. We consider a special class of MAC-WT channels which we call the weak eavesdropper class, where each user's link to the legitimate receiver is stronger than its link to the eavesdropper. For this class of channels, we develop an outer bound for the secrecy capacity region, which partially matches the achievable region in an n-letter form. We evaluate a looser version of our outer bound for the Gaussian case, and show that our outer bound is within 0.5 bits/channel use of the achievable rates along the individual secrecy rates for all weak eavesdropper Gaussian MAC-WT. Then, we investigate the effects of user cooperation on the secrecy of broadcast channels by considering the cooperative relay broadcast channel (CRBC). We propose an achievable scheme that combines Marton's coding scheme for broadcast channels and Cover and El Gamal's compress-and-forward (CAF) scheme for relay channels. For the Gaussian CRBC, we show that both users can have positive secrecy rates, which is not possible for scalar Gaussian broadcast channels without cooperation. We further investigate the effects of user cooperation on secrecy by considering the multiple access channel with generalized feedback (MAC-GF), which can be viewed as the MAC-dual of the CRBC. We propose a CAF-based achievable secrecy rate region for the MAC-GF. Specializing our results to a Gaussian MAC-GF, we present numerical results which demonstrate that cooperation can improve secrecy for the MAC-GF. Next, we study the two-user one-eavesdropper discrete memoryless compound wiretap channel, and provide the best known lower bound for the secrecy capacity of this compound channel. We evaluate this achievable secrecy rate for the Gaussian MIMO case by using DPC. We show that this achievable secrecy rate achieves at least half of the secrecy capacity of this Gaussian MIMO compound wiretap channel, and also attains the secrecy capacity when the eavesdropper is degraded with respect to one of the two users. Then, we study the degraded compound multi-receiver wiretap channel (DCMRWC), which, in addition to a group of eavesdroppers, has two groups of users, namely the stronger group and the weaker group. We study two different communication scenarios for this channel. In the first scenario, there is only one eavesdropper, and the transmitter sends a confidential message to each group of legitimate users while keeping both messages secret from the eavesdropper. In the second scenario, we study the DCMRWC with layered messages without any restriction on the number of eavesdroppers. For both scenarios, we obtain the secrecy capacity region for the discrete memoryless channel, the parallel channel, and the Gaussian parallel channel. For the Gaussian MIMO channel, we obtain the secrecy capacity region when there is only one user in the second group. Next, we study the two-user fading broadcast channel and obtain its ergodic secrecy capacity region. We show that, thanks to fading, both users can have simultaneous secure communication with the transmitter, although this is not possible in the scalar non-fading Gaussian broadcast channel where only one user can have secure communication. This simultaneous secrecy of both users is achieved by an opportunistic communication scheme, in which, at each time instant, the transmitter communicates with the user having a better channel gain. Then, we study the secure lossy transmission of a vector Gaussian source to a legitimate user in the presence of an eavesdropper, where both the legitimate user and the eavesdropper have vector Gaussian side information. We obtain an outer bound for the rate, equivocation and distortion region. Moreover, we obtain the maximum equivocation at the eavesdropper when there is no constraint on the transmission rate. By using this maximum equivocation result, we show two facts. First, for this problem, in general, Wyner-Ziv scheme is suboptimal, although, it is optimal in the absence of an eavesdropper. And, second, even when there is no transmission rate constraint, an uncoded transmission scheme is suboptimal; the presence of an eavesdropper necessitates the use of a coded scheme to attain the maximum equivocation. Finally, we revisit the secure lossy source coding problem. In all works on this problem, either the equivocation of the source at the eavesdropper or the equivocation of the legitimate user's reconstruction of the source at the eavesdropper is used to measure secrecy. We first propose the relative equivocation of the source at the eavesdropper with respect to the legitimate user as a new secrecy measure. We argue that this new secrecy measure is the one that corresponds to the natural generalization of the equivocation in a wiretap channel to the context of secure lossy source coding. Under this new secrecy measure, we provide a single-letter description of the rate, relative equivocation and distortion region, as well as its specializations to degraded and reversely degraded cases. We investigate the relationships between the optimal scheme that attains this region and the Wyner-Ziv scheme.
Physical layer security has been recently recognized as a promising new design paradigm to provide security in wireless networks. In addition to the existing conventional cryptographic methods, physical layer security exploits the dynamics of fading channels to enhance secured wireless links. In this approach, jamming plays a key role by generating noise signals to confuse the potential eavesdroppers, and significantly improves quality and reliability of secure communications between legitimate terminals. This article presents theoretical limits and practical designs of jamming approaches for physical layer security. In particular, the theoretical limits explore the achievable secrecy rates of user cooperation-based jamming whilst the centralized and game theoretic-based precoding techniques are reviewed for practical implementations. In addition, the emerging wireless energy harvesting techniques are exploited to harvest the required energy to transmit jamming signals. Future directions of these approaches and the associated research challenges are also briefly outlined.
The broadcasting attribute of the wireless communication channel poses severe security vulnerabilities since any adversary node in the range of reception is able to listen as well as to disrupt the ongoing communication. This dissertation considers the problem of security from two different perspectives: The information-theoretic approach at the physical-layer to avert eavesdropping and centralized and decentralized detection algorithms to detect the presence of a jammer. In the first part, we apply the available tools in information-theoretic security to study the achievable secrecy rate region of the following channel models: the discrete memoryless broadcast channel with two confidential messages for each of the two users, the discrete memoryless interference channel with two confidential messages, and the discrete memoryless untrusted relay channel with decode-and-forward (DF) relays (DMURC). For the first two scenarios, we extend the existing results on the weak secrecy to the strong secrecy criterion. Owing to its definition, the strong secrecy has a practical interpretation, whereas weak secrecy provides asymptotic results. In the third scenario, we apply a precoder and a post-decoder in addition to the common channel coding required to provide secrecy, to deal with the dishonest nature of the relays. An achievable secrecy rate region for DMURC is established. We revisit the untrusted relay scenario with some different assumptions: with Gaussian channel and both DF and amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying. The objective, however, is to develop a secure scheme that allows for weaker secrecy than Shannon’s perfect secrecy but with a higher transmission rate. We propose a new measure for secrecy, referred to as a-secrecy (0 = a = 1), where a = 1 represents the perfect secrecy, whereas a = 0 denotes no secrecy at all. We suggest using a cross-layer design where at the physical layer the information-theoretic security is applied and some higher layer scheme, e.g. secure network coding, allows to obtain any point in the transmission rate and a-secrecy trade-off. The analysis of performance achievable by the scheme leads to a mixed-integer optimization problem. Moreover, we study the problem asymptotically to gain some insights. Active security attacks are the main focus of the second part of this thesis. We study the problem of joint jamming detection and spectrum sensing. The problem arises in the cognitive radio scenario, where the secondary users (SU)s sensing the channel to detect the primary users (PU)s. We model the problem as a multiple-hypothesis testing problem where the observations from the SUs experience spatial channel correlation. The optimal test statistic is derived according to Neyman-Pearson lemma. We derive the exact probability distribution of the test statistic in terms of Meijer’s G-functions. We consider a practical application where the SUs’ power efficiency is analyzed. This leads to a non-convex optimization problem that addresses the power efficiency and detection performance trade-off. The detection performance in the exact form is too complex to be handled analytically, therefore, we consider the asymptotic regime. Two heuristics are proposed to tackle the optimization problem; one based on the projected gradient method and the other one is motivated by the KKT conditions. All of the algorithms mentioned above are designed for a centralized system. Taking into account the susceptibility of centralized systems to the Byzantine attacks, we study the decentralization of eigenvalue-based detection algorithms in the last chapter of this thesis. We use generic consensus algorithm as a building block in decentralizing an eigenvalue estimator algorithm. The algorithm estimates all eigenvalues of a covariance matrix, which is available only partly to each node. We further modify the algorithm for two special practical scenarios, including the channel probing for admission control problem.
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.
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 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .