In this paper, we address the problem of joint covert communication and secure transmission in untrusted relaying networks when multiple wardens exist in the network. We first consider a system model consisting of one source, one untrusted amplify-and-forward relay, one destination, and one warden. For covert communications, our aim is to prevent the warden from detecting the presence of communications via the source-relay-destination link. For secure transmission, our aim is to prevent the untrusted relay from decoding the source signal. To satisfy these requirements, we propose that the destination and the source inject jamming signals during the source-to-relay and relay-to-destination transmission phases, respectively. For the considered system model, we propose a power allocation strategy to maximize the secrecy rate and satisfy the covert requirements in both of the phases. Given that the proposed optimization problem is non-convex, we employ the successive convex approximation (SCA) approach to derive a tractable solution. To obtain further insights, we generalize our analytical results to consider multiple untrusted relays and multiple wardens. We focus on two scenarios of non-colluding and colluding wardens. Our results highlight that as the number of relays increases, the achievable secrecy rate increases while the average detection error probability decreases. This is a novel observation of a fundamental trade-off between covert requirement and secrecy performance.
In this paper, we address the problem of joint covert communication and secure transmission in untrusted relaying networks when multiple wardens exist in the network. We first consider a system model consisting of one source, one untrusted amplify-and-forward relay, one destination, and one warden. For covert communications, our aim is to prevent the warden from detecting the presence of communications via the source-relay-destination link. For secure transmission, our aim is to prevent the untrusted relay from decoding the source signal. To satisfy these requirements, we propose that the destination and the source inject jamming signals during the source-to-relay and relay-to-destination transmission phases, respectively. For the considered system model, we propose a power allocation strategy to maximize the secrecy rate and satisfy the covert requirements in both of the phases. Given that the proposed optimization problem is non-convex, we employ the successive convex approximation (SCA) approach to derive a tractable solution. To obtain further insights, we generalize our analytical results to consider multiple untrusted relays and multiple wardens. We focus on two scenarios of non-colluding and colluding wardens. Our results highlight that as the number of relays increases, the achievable secrecy rate increases while the average detection error probability decreases. This is a novel observation of a fundamental trade-off between covert requirement and secrecy performance.
In this paper, we investigate the problem of secure communication with covert requirement in untrusted relaying networks. Our considered system model contains one source, one destination, one untrusted relay, and one Willie. The untrusted relay tries to extract the information signal, while the goal of Willie is to detect the presence of the information signal transmitted by the source, in the current time slot. To overcome these two attacks, it is assumed that the destination and the source inject jamming signal to the network in phase I and phase II, respectively. Accordingly, the communication in our proposed system model is accomplished in two phases. In the first phase, when the source transmits its data to the untrusted relay, the destination broadcasts its jamming signal. In the second phase, when the relay retransmits the received signal, the source transmits a jamming signal with one of its antennas. For this system model, we suggest a novel power allocation strategy to maximize the instantaneous secrecy rate subject to satisfying the covert requirements in both of the phases. Since the proposed optimization problem is non-convex, the Successive Convex Approximation (SCA) method is used to change it to a convex optimization problem. Numerical curves are presented to reveal the impact of the untrusted relay's location an number of source antennas on the secrecy performance.
In this study, we investigate information-theoretical security and covert communication. In covert communication, our aim is communication via the source-relay-destination link, without noticing the existence of communication by the multiple antenna warden. For secure transmission, our aim is to prevent possible eavesdropping by multiple antenna untrusted relay. To satisfy these requirements, we proposed a cooperative jamming strategy in two phases of transmission. In the proposed scheme, the source has multiple antenna and the efficiency of the maximum-ratio transmission/maximum-ratio combining (MRT/MRC) method for sending data to the relay has been evaluated. Due to the total transmit power restriction in each phase, a constrained optimization problem is formulated. Then, it is solved by converting to a multi-objective optimization problem. Finally, we employ the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGAII) to solve it.
In this article, we investigate joint information-theoretic secrecy and covert communication in a single-input-multioutput (SIMO) system where a transmitter (Alice) is communicating with two legitimate users (Bob and Carol). We consider that an untrusted user and a warden node are also present in the network attempting to attack the secure and covert communications to Bob and Carol, respectively. Specifically, Bob requires secure communications such that his messages from Alice are not decoded by the untrusted user, while Carol requires covert communications such that her messages from Alice are not detected by the warden. To do so, we consider that Alice transmits Carol's messages during selected time slots to hide them from the warden while also transmitting Bob's messages in each time slot contentiously. We formulate an optimization problem with the aim of maximizing the average rate subject to a covert communication requirement and a secure communications constraint. Since the proposed optimization problem is nonconvex, we utilize successive convex approximation to obtain a tractable solution. Moreover, we extend our proposed system model to multiple antenna Alice scenario and find beamforming vectors so that the average sum rate is maximized. Furthermore, we consider practical assumptions that Alice has imperfect knowledge of the warden's location and imperfect channel state information (CSI) of Bob and Carol. Our numerical examples highlight that the imperfect CSI at Carol has a more detrimental impact on the average rate compared to imperfect CSI at Bob.
Abstract This paper addresses the power allocation problem in a network where joint information-theoretic secrecy and covert communication are required. In this network, a single transmitter (Alice) sends information to two legitimate users (Bob and Carol). There is also an untrusted user who attempts to detect the content of Bob’s message and a warden (Willie) who wants to detect the existence of communication between Alice and the two users. Thus, Carol requires covert transmission, and Bob requires secure and covert communication. The network utilizes a friendly jammer to address these demands and overcome the low transmission rate of covert communication. To achieve covert communication, Alice sends both users’ data simultaneously in selected time slots to hide it from Willie, while the jammer continuously transmits signals in all time slots. The objective is to maximize the average transmission rate over the allocated powers of Bob, Carol, and the jammer while meeting the two users’ requirements. A novel iterative algorithm is proposed to obtain an effective solution. Simulation results indicate that the proposed method can enhance the network’s average rate while satisfying the users’ demands.
This paper studies the covert and secure communications in a UAV-aided untrust relay system composed of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), a base station (BS), a user and a warden (Willie). The UAV collects data from underground users, and then uploads it to the BS. The BS forwards it to the remote user. The UAV attempts to perform covert communication with the BS in the presence of Willie, while the untrust BS serving as a relay also intercepts the message from the UAV. To ensure the covert and secure communications, we first derive the average minimum detection error rate (DEP) at Willie’s location using the noise uncertainty model. We then formulate the average covert transmission rate maximization as an optimization problem with the constraints of covertness and security requirements. We further solve the optimization problem using a search method. Numerical results are provided to validate our theoretical analysis and also to illustrate the impact of power allocation factors on the covert and secure rate. Finally, we achieve maximization of the covert transmission rate in different scenarios.
In this work, by considering a variety of realistic hardware impairments, we aim to enhance the security of a cooperative relaying network, where a source intends to transmit its confidential information to a destination in the presence of a group of untrusted amplify-and-forward relays, as potential eavesdroppers (Eves), and an entirely passive multiple-antenna aided Eve. Our goal is to safeguard the information against these two types of eavesdropping attacks, while simultaneously relying on the untrusted relays to boost both the security and reliability of the network. To reach this goal, we propose a novel joint cooperative beamforming, jamming and power allocation policy to safeguard the confidential information while concurrently achieving the required quality-of-service at the destination. We also take into account both the total power budget constraint and a practical individual power constraint for each node. Our optimization problem can be split into two consecutive sub-problems. In the first sub-problem, we are faced with a non-convex problem which can be transformed into the powerful difference of convex (DC) program. A low-complexity iterative algorithm is proposed to solve the DC program, which relies on the constrained concave-convex procedure (CCCP). We further introduce a novel initialization method, which is based on a feasible point of the original problem obtained from a novel iterative feasibility search procedure, rather than an arbitrary (infeasible) point as in the conventional CCCP. The second sub-problem of our optimization problem is a convex optimization problem and can be solved efficiently adopting the classic interior point method. The numerical results provided illustrate that although the trusted relaying scenario outperforms the untrusted relaying for small and medium total power budgets, however, by increasing the total power budget, the secrecy performances of both the trusted and untrusted relaying converge to the same. Additionally, by equally sharing the total impairments at the relays between the transmitter and the receiver the best secrecy performance is presented.