Physical layer security (PLS) is a new paradigm aiming at securing communications between legitimate parties at the physical layer. Conventionally, achieving confidentiality in communication networks relies on cryptographic techniques such as public-key cryptography, secret-key distribution and symmetric encryption. Such techniques are deemed secure based on the assumption of limited computational abilities of a wiretapper. Given the relentless progress in computational capacities and the dynamic topology and proliferation of modern wireless networks, the relevance of the previous techniques in securing communications is more and more questionable and less and less reliable. In contrast to this paradigm, PLS does not assume a specific computational power at any eavesdropper, its premise to guarantee provable security via employing channel coding techniques at the physical layer exploiting the inherent randomness in most communication systems. In this dissertation, we investigate a particular aspect of PLS, which is secret-key agreement, also known as secret-sharing. In this setup, two legitimate parties try to distill a secret-key via the observation of correlated signals through a noisy wireless channel, in the presence of an eavesdropper who must be kept ignorant of the secret-key. Additionally, a noiseless public channel is made available to the legitimate parties to exchange public messages that are also accessible to the eavesdropper. Recall that key agreement is an important aspect toward realizing secure communications in the sense that the key can be used in a one-time pad scheme to send the confidential message. In the first part, our focus is on secret-sharing over Rayleigh fading quasi-static channels. We study the fundamental relationship relating the probability of error and a given target secret-key rate in the high power regime. This is characterized through the diversity multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) concept, that we define for our model and then characterize it. We show that the impact of the secrecy constraint is to reduce the effective number of transmit antennas by the number of antennas at the eavesdropper. Toward this characterization, we provide several schemes achieving the DMT and we highlight disparities between coding for the wiretap channel and coding for secret-key agreement. In the second part of the present work, we consider a fast-fading setting in which the wireless channels change during each channel use. We consider a correlated environment where transmit, legitimate receiver and eavesdropper antennas are correlated. We characterize the optimal strategy achieving the highest secret-key rate. We also identify the impact of correlation matrices and illustrate our analysis with various numerical results. Finally, we study the system from an energy-efficiency point of view and evaluate relevant metrics as the minimum energy required for sharing a secret-key bit and the wideband slope.
Physical layer security (PLS) is a new paradigm aiming at securing communications between legitimate parties at the physical layer. Conventionally, achieving confidentiality in communication networks relies on cryptographic techniques such as public-key cryptography, secret-key distribution and symmetric encryption. Such techniques are deemed secure based on the assumption of limited computational abilities of a wiretapper. Given the relentless progress in computational capacities and the dynamic topology and proliferation of modern wireless networks, the relevance of the previous techniques in securing communications is more and more questionable and less and less reliable. In contrast to this paradigm, PLS does not assume a specific computational power at any eavesdropper, its premise to guarantee provable security via employing channel coding techniques at the physical layer exploiting the inherent randomness in most communication systems. In this dissertation, we investigate a particular aspect of PLS, which is secret-key agreement, also known as secret-sharing. In this setup, two legitimate parties try to distill a secret-key via the observation of correlated signals through a noisy wireless channel, in the presence of an eavesdropper who must be kept ignorant of the secret-key. Additionally, a noiseless public channel is made available to the legitimate parties to exchange public messages that are also accessible to the eavesdropper. Recall that key agreement is an important aspect toward realizing secure communications in the sense that the key can be used in a one-time pad scheme to send the confidential message. In the first part, our focus is on secret-sharing over Rayleigh fading quasi-static channels. We study the fundamental relationship relating the probability of error and a given target secret-key rate in the high power regime. This is characterized through the diversity multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) concept, that we define for our model and then characterize it. We show that the impact of the secrecy constraint is to reduce the effective number of transmit antennas by the number of antennas at the eavesdropper. Toward this characterization, we provide several schemes achieving the DMT and we highlight disparities between coding for the wiretap channel and coding for secret-key agreement. In the second part of the present work, we consider a fast-fading setting in which the wireless channels change during each channel use. We consider a correlated environment where transmit, legitimate receiver and eavesdropper antennas are correlated. We characterize the optimal strategy achieving the highest secret-key rate. We also identify the impact of correlation matrices and illustrate our analysis with various numerical results. Finally, we study the system from an energy-efficiency point of view and evaluate relevant metrics as the minimum energy required for sharing a secret-key bit and the wideband slope.
Despite the tremendous progress made toward establishing PLS as a new paradigm to guarantee security of communication systems at the physical layer, there is a common belief among researchers and industrials that there are many practical challenges that prevent PLS from flourishing at the industrial scale. Most secure message transmission constructions available to date are tied to strong assumptions on CSI, consider simple channel models and undermine eavesdropping capabilities; thus compromising their practical interest to a big extent. Perhaps arguably, the most likely reasonable way to leverage PLS potential in securing modern wireless communication systems is via secret-key agreement. In the latter setting, the legitimate parties try to agree on a key exploiting availability of a public channel with high capacity which is also accessible to the eavesdropper. Once a key is shared by the legitimate parties, they may use it in a one-time pad encryption, for instance. In this article, we investigate two performance limits of secret-key agreement communications; namely, the secret-key diversity-multiplexing trade-off and the effect of transmit correlation on the secret-key capacity. We show via examples how secret-key agreement offers more flexibility than secure message transmissions. Finally, we explore a few challenges of secret-key agreement concept and propose a few guidelines to overturn them.
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.
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 thesis focuses on the privacy of communication that can be ensured by means of the physical layer, i.e., by appropriately chosen coding and resource allocation schemes. The fundamentals of physical-layer security have been already formulated in the 1970s by Wyner (1975), Csiszár and Körner (1978). But only nowadays we have the technical progress such that these ideas can find their way in current and future communication systems, which has driven the growing interest in this area of research in the last years. We analyze two physical-layer approaches that can ensure the secret transmission of private information in wireless systems in presence of an eavesdropper. One is the direct transmission of the information to the intended receiver, where the transmitter has to simultaneously ensure the reliability and the secrecy of the information. The other is a two-phase approach, where two legitimated users first agree on a common and secret key, which they use afterwards to encrypt the information before it is transmitted. In this case, the secrecy and the reliability of the transmission are managed separately in the two phases. The secrecy of the transmitted messages mainly depends on reliable information or reasonable and justifiable assumptions about the channel to the potential eavesdropper. Perfect state information about the channel to a passive eavesdropper is not a rational assumption. Thus, we introduce a deterministic model for the uncertainty about this channel, which yields a set of possible eavesdropper channels. We consider the optimization of worst-case rates in systems with multi-antenna Gaussian channels for both approaches. We study which transmit strategy can yield a maximum rate if we assume that the eavesdropper can always observe the corresponding worst-case channel that reduces the achievable rate for the secret transmission to a minimum. For both approaches, we show that the resulting max-min problem over the matrices that describe the multi-antenna system can be reduced to an equivalent problem over the eigenvalues of these matrices. We characterize the optimal resource allocation under a sum power constraint over all antennas and derive waterfilling solutions for the corresponding worst-case channel to the eavesdropper for a constraint on the sum of all channel gains. We show that all rates converge to finite limits for high signal-to-noise ratios (SNR), if we do not restrict the number of antennas for the eavesdropper. These limits are characterized by the quotients of the eigenvalues resulting from the Gramian matrices of both channels. For the low-SNR regime, we observe a rate increase that depends only on the differences of these eigenvalues for the direct-transmission approach. For the key generation approach, there exists no dependence from the eavesdropper channel in this regime. The comparison of both approaches shows that the superiority of an approach over the other mainly depends on the SNR and the quality of the eavesdropper channel. The direct-transmission approach is advantageous for low SNR and comparably bad eavesdropper channels, whereas the key generation approach benefits more from high SNR and comparably good eavesdropper channels. All results are discussed in combination with numerous illustrations.
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.
Wireless networks have experienced rapid evolutions toward sustainability, scalability and interoperability. The digital economy is driven by future networked societies to a more holistic community of intelligent infrastructures and connected services for a more sustainable and smarter society. Furthermore, an enormous amount of sensitive and confidential information, e.g., medical records, electronic media, financial data, and customer files, is transmitted via wireless channels. The implementation of higher layer key distribution and management was challenged by the emergence of these new advanced systems. In order to resist various malicious abuses and security attacks, physical layer security (PLS) has become an appealing alternative. The basic concept behind PLS is to exploit the characteristics of wireless channels for the confidentiality. Its target is to blind the eavesdroppers such that they cannot extract any confidential information from the received signals. This thesis presents solutions and analyses to improve the PLS in wireless networks. \n \nIn the second chapter, we investigate the secrecy capacity performance of an amplify-andforward (AF) dual-hop network for both distributed beamforming (DBF) and opportunistic relaying (OR) techniques. We derive the capacity scaling for two large sets; trustworthy relays and untrustworthy aggressive relays cooperating together with a wire-tapper aiming to intercept the message. We show that the capacity scaling in the DBF is lower bounded by a value which depends on the ratio between the number of the trustworthy and the untrustworthy aggressive relays, whereas the capacity scaling of OR is upper bounded by a value depending on the number of relays as well as the signal to noise ratio (SNR). \n \nIn the third chapter, we propose a new location-based multicasting technique, for dual phase AF large networks, aiming to improve the security in the presence of non-colluding passive eavesdroppers. We analytically demonstrate that the proposed technique increases the security by decreasing the probability of re-choosing a sector that has eavesdroppers, for each transmission time. Moreover, we also show that the secrecy capacity scaling of our technique is the same as for broadcasting. Hereafter, the lower and upper bounds of the secrecy outage probability are calculated, and it is shown that the security performance is remarkably enhanced, compared to the conventional multicasting technique. \n \nIn the fourth chapter, we propose a new cooperative protocol, for dual phase amplify-andforward large wireless sensor networks, aiming to improve the transmission security while taking into account the limited capabilities of the sensor nodes. In such a network, a portion of the K relays can be potential passive eavesdroppers. To reduce the impact of these untrustworthy relays on the network security, we propose a new transmission protocol, where the source agrees to share with the destination a given channel state information (CSI) of source-trusted relay-destination link to encode the message. Then, the source will use this CSI again to map the right message to a certain sector while transmitting fake messages to the other sectors. Adopting such a security protocol is promising because of the availability of a high number of cheap electronic sensors with limited computational capabilities. For the proposed scheme, we derived the secrecy outage probability (SOP) and demonstrated that the probability of receiving the right encoded information by an untrustworthy relay is inversely proportional to the number of sectors. We also show that the aggressive behavior of cooperating untrusted relays is not effective compared to the case where each untrusted relay is trying to intercept the transmitted message individually. \n \nFifth and last, we investigate the physical layer security performance over Rayleigh fading channels in the presence of impulsive noise, as encountered, for instance, in smart grid environments. For this scheme, secrecy performance metrics were considered with and without destination assisted jamming at the eavesdropper’s side. From the obtained results, it is verified that the SOP, without destination assisted jamming, is flooring at high signal-to-noise-ratio values and that it can be significantly improved with the use of jamming.