As the demand for spectrum increases, co-existence between radar and communication systems has been of increased interest. However, the effect of a radar signal on the secrecy capacity of a communication system operating in the environment has not been addressed. Particularly, for military operations, the limited dynamic range of real receivers is important to consider because the radar signal is often large enough to send the receivers into nonlinearity. In this paper, information-theoretic secrecy is considered when a friendly radar is present in the wiretap channel: the intended receiver Bob can cancel the radar signal before recording the signal based on a key sequence which is shared by the radar with the transmitter Alice and with Bob. However, due to the non-linear conversion operation in the eavesdropper Eve's receiver, Eve is inhibited from recovering the transmitted signal even if she obtains the key after storing the received signal. We analyze the information-theoretic secrecy rate of a wiretap channel co-existing with the radar signal without Gaussian assumptions on the radar signal. This analysis is made difficult relative to prior work due to the complex structure of the radar signal and the correlation between the two dimensions. We show that a positive secrecy rate can be achieved, even when the eavesdropper is closer to the transmitter than the intended receiver.
As the demand for spectrum increases, co-existence between radar and communication systems has been of increased interest. However, the effect of a radar signal on the secrecy capacity of a communication system operating in the environment has not been addressed. Particularly, for military operations, the limited dynamic range of real receivers is important to consider because the radar signal is often large enough to send the receivers into nonlinearity. In this paper, information-theoretic secrecy is considered when a friendly radar is present in the wiretap channel: the intended receiver Bob can cancel the radar signal before recording the signal based on a key sequence which is shared by the radar with the transmitter Alice and with Bob. However, due to the non-linear conversion operation in the eavesdropper Eve's receiver, Eve is inhibited from recovering the transmitted signal even if she obtains the key after storing the received signal. We analyze the information-theoretic secrecy rate of a wiretap channel co-existing with the radar signal without Gaussian assumptions on the radar signal. This analysis is made difficult relative to prior work due to the complex structure of the radar signal and the correlation between the two dimensions. We show that a positive secrecy rate can be achieved, even when the eavesdropper is closer to the transmitter than the intended receiver.
Secure communication over a memoryless wiretap channel in the presence of a passive eavesdropper is considered. Traditional information-theoretic security methods require an advantage for the main channel over the eavesdropper channel to achieve a positive secrecy rate, which in general cannot be guaranteed in wireless systems. Here, we exploit the non-linear conversion operation in the eavesdropper's receiver to obtain the desired advantage - even when the eavesdropper has perfect access to the transmitted signal at the input to their receiver. The basic idea is to employ an ephemeral cryptographic key to force the eavesdropper to conduct two operations, at least one of which is non-linear, in a different order than the desired recipient. Since non-linear operations are not necessarily commutative, the desired advantage can be obtained and information-theoretic secrecy achieved even if the eavesdropper is given the cryptographic key immediately upon transmission completion. In essence, the lack of knowledge of the key during the short transmission time inhibits the recording of the signal in such a way that the secret information can never be extracted from it. The achievable secrecy rates for different countermeasures that the eavesdropper might employ are evaluated. It is shown that even in the case of an eavesdropper with uniformly better conditions (channel and receiver quality) than the intended recipient, a positive secrecy rate can be achieved.
Secure communication over a wireless channel in the presence of a passive eavesdropper is considered. Our main interest is in the disadvantaged wireless environment, where the channel from the transmitter Alice to the eavesdropper Eve is (possibly much) better than that from Alice to Bob, hence making information-theoretic secrecy challenging. We present a method to exploit inherent vulnerabilities of the eavesdropper's receiver through the use of “cheap” cryptographically-secure key-bits, which only need be kept secret from Eve for the (short) transmission period of the message, to obtain information-theoretic (i.e. everlasting) secret bits at Bob. In particular, based on an ephemeral cryptographic key pre-shared between Alice and Bob, a random jamming signal with large variations is added to each symbol. The legitimate receiver Bob uses the key to subtract the jamming signal immediately, while Eve is forced to perform the inherently nonlinear operation of recording the signal; when Eve then obtains the key, which we assume pessimistically (for Alice) happens right after message transmission, Eve can then immediately subtract the jamming signal from the recorded signal. But, because of the intervening non-linear operation in Eve's receiver and the non-commutativity of nonlinear operations, Bob's channel and Eve's channel have different achievable rates and information-theoretic secrecy can be obtained, hence achieving the goal of converting the vulnerable cryptographic secret key into information-theoretic secure bits. The achievable secrecy rates for different settings are evaluated. Among other results, it is shown that, even when the eavesdropper has perfect access to the output of the transmitter (albeit through an imperfect analog-to-digital converter), the method can still achieve a positive secrecy rate.
We study the secrecy capacity of Gaussian wiretap channel aided by an external jammer/helper. Both the transmitter and the intended receiver are equipped with a single antenna, while the eavesdropper and the jammer are equipped withMandNantennas, respectively. Generally, an analytical form of the secrecy capacity in this scenario is difficult to obtain. Instead, we consider a null-space jamming scheme which totally nulls out the jamming signal at the legitimate receiver, and derive lower and upper bounds on its maximal achievable secrecy rateRN. The relationship between the average secrecy capacityCˉNof Gaussian wiretap channel and the average secrecy rateRˉNachieved by the null-space jamming scheme is investigated, and we prove thatRˉN≤CˉN≤RˉN+1. Based on this inequality and the derived lower and upper bounds onRN, the upper and lower bounds on the average secrecy capacity of Gaussian wiretap channel aided by an external jammer can be obtained, where our result shows that whenN>M, the average secrecy capacity increases linearly with the total transmit power; while whenN≤M−1, there exists a performance ceiling on it.
We consider a secret communication scenario where Alice wants to transmit secretly to Bob in presence of a passive eavesdropper Eve. The Alice-Bob channel is a fixed-SNR AWGN channel, while the Alice-Eve channel is a fast Rayleigh fading channel, with the channel states only known to Eve. Alice knows the statistics of Alice-Eve channel, but not the exact realizations. We investigate the achievable secrecy rates for this channel model with Gaussian signaling and discrete signaling. For Gaussian signaling, several transmission strategies according to the main channel's relative channel gain are proposed and evaluated. For discrete signaling, achievable secrecy rates with Quadrature Am- plitude Modulation (QAM) are evaluated. When Bob's channel is much better than Eve's channel, simple Gaussian signaling can perform close to the upper bound, and is better than the rate achieved with M-QAM. When Bob's channel gain is on average worse than the eavesdropper's average channel gain, positive secrecy rate can still be achieved for Gaussian signaling with artificial noise injection and a burst signaling strategy. Moreover, M-QAM can outperform Gaussian signaling. The key factor that enables secret communication in this case is that both M-QAM and artificial noise limit the leakage of information when Eve's channel is unusually good.
Confidentiality of information is a key consideration in many networking applications, including e-commerce, online banking, and intelligence operations. How can information be communicated reliably to the legitimate users, while keeping it secret from eavesdroppers? How does such a secrecy constraint on communication affect the limits on information flow in the network? In this chapter, we study these questions under the information theoretic notion of secrecy, which requires each eavesdropper to obtain essentially no information about the messages sent from knowledge of its received sequence, the channel statistics, and the codebooks used. We investigate two approaches to achieve secure communication. The first is to exploit the statistics of the channel from the sender to the legitimate receivers and the eavesdroppers. We introduce the wiretap channel as a 2-receiver broadcast channel with a legitimate receiver and an eavesdropper, and establish its secrecy capacity, which is the highest achievable secret communication rate. The idea is to design the encoder so that the channel from the sender to the receiver becomes effectively stronger than the channel to the eavesdropper; hence the receiver can recover the message but the eavesdropper cannot. This wiretap coding scheme involves multicoding and randomized encoding. If the channel from the sender to the receiver is weaker than that to the eavesdropper, however, secret communication at a positive rate is not possible. This brings us to the second approach to achieve secret communication, which is to use a secret key shared between the sender and the receiver but unknown to the eavesdropper. We show that the rate of such secret key must be at least as high as the rate of the confidential message. This raises the question of how the sender and the receiver can agree on such a long secret key in the first place. After all, if they had a confidential channel with sufficiently high capacity to communicate the key, then why not use it to communicate the message itself! We show that if the sender and the receiver have access to correlated sources (e.g., through a satellite beaming common randomness to them), then they can still agree on a secret key even when the channel has zero secrecy capacity. We first consider the source model for key agreement, where the sender communicates with the receiver over a noiseless public broadcast channel to generate a secret key from their correlated sources.
We study the Gaussian MIMO wiretap channel with a transmitter, a legitimate receiver, an eavesdropper and an external helper, each equipped with multiple antennas. The transmitter sends confidential messages to its intended receiver, while the helper transmits jamming signals independent of the source message to confuse the eavesdropper. The jamming signal is assumed to be treated as noise at both the intended receiver and the eavesdropper. We obtain a closed-form expression for the structure of the artificial noise covariance matrix that guarantees a secrecy rate larger or at least equal to the secrecy capacity of the wiretap channel with no jamming signal. We also describe how to find specific realizations of this covariance matrix expression that provide good secrecy rate performance, even when there is no nontrivial null space between the helper and the intended receiver. Unlike prior work, our approach considers the general MIMO case, and is not restricted to SISO or MISO scenarios.