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IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology

Secure MIMO-SVD Communications Against Eavesdroppers With Any Number of Antennas

Jie Tang, Hong Wen, Huanhuan Song, Kai Zeng, Kaiyu Qin

Published Jul 7, 2020• 9 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Physical layer security (PLS) provides strong and lightweight secure communications for vehicle networks, which has attracted great attention. However, current schemes cannot defend against the passive eavesdroppers with any number of antennas. To fill this gap, we propose a physical layer secure MIMO-SVD (singular value decomposition) communication scheme (SSVD) to defend against such an eavesdropper with any number of antennas. In the SSVD scheme, the confidential information first goes through a special data frames secure process at the transmitter. After that, by integrating with SSVD precoding, the key information is attached and delivered in the combination of activated/non-activated MIMO parallel sub-channels of the legitimate receiver through the wireless channel. Due to the uniqueness and independence of wireless channel, only the legitimate receiver can observe the key information and use it to “decrypt” (XOR) the confidential information step by step with an arbitrary low BER (bit error rate). However, for any other eavesdropper who suffers an independent channel from legitimate users, the eavesdropper cannot obtain any key information from the received signals, regardless of how many antennas he/she has. Consequently, the eavesdropper cannot “decrypt” any information about the confidential information. The SSVD security and reliability are theoretically analyzed, and the simulation and numerical results fully verified its validity and effectiveness.

DOI
10.1109/tvt.2020.3007430

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Physical layer security (PLS) provides strong and lightweight secure communications for vehicle networks, which has attracted great attention. However, current schemes cannot defend against the passive eavesdroppers with any number of antennas. To fill this gap, we propose a physical layer secure MIMO-SVD (singular value decomposition) communication scheme (SSVD) to defend against such an eavesdropper with any number of antennas. In the SSVD scheme, the confidential information first goes through a special data frames secure process at the transmitter. After that, by integrating with SSVD precoding, the key information is attached and delivered in the combination of activated/non-activated MIMO parallel sub-channels of the legitimate receiver through the wireless channel. Due to the uniqueness and independence of wireless channel, only the legitimate receiver can observe the key information and use it to “decrypt” (XOR) the confidential information step by step with an arbitrary low BER (bit error rate). However, for any other eavesdropper who suffers an independent channel from legitimate users, the eavesdropper cannot obtain any key information from the received signals, regardless of how many antennas he/she has. Consequently, the eavesdropper cannot “decrypt” any information about the confidential information. The SSVD security and reliability are theoretically analyzed, and the simulation and numerical results fully verified its validity and effectiveness.
Recently, MIMO (multiple-input-multiple-output) physical layer secure transmission has attracted great attentions. However, current schemes cannot defend against the passive eavesdroppers with arbitrary number of antennas. To address this problem, in this work, we propose a practical physical layer MIMO secure communication scheme (PLSC) to defend against such an eavesdropper with arbitrary number of antennas. In the proposed scheme, the transmitter first independently generates a random binary sequence as the “key bits (KB)” to “encrypt” (XOR) the confidential information. After that, the transmitter sends the “encrypted information” over the wireless channel, along with mapping key bits to the legitimate receiver simultaneously. The key principle lies in that the KB information is coded in the indexes of the activated/non-activated antennas combination of the legitimate user. Then, the legitimate receiver first observes his/her activated antenna indexes to obtain the corresponding key bits. After that, he/she demodulates the “encrypted information” at the activated antennas, and finally “decrypts” (XOR) the confidential information by using the observed key bits. However, due to the uniqueness and independence of MIMO wireless channel, for any other eavesdroppers who suffer an independent channel from legitimate users, we prove that it cannot observe any information about KB from the received signals, regardless of how many antennas it has used. Consequently, without knowledge of KB, it cannot decrypt any information about the confidential information, too. The reliability and security of PLSC are theoretically demonstrated. The simulation and numerical results fully verified the validity and effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
We present two attacks on two different versions of physical layer cryptography schemes based on massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO). Both cryptosystems employ a singular value decomposition (SVD) precoding technique. For the first one, we show that the eavesdropper (who knows its own channel and the channel between legitimate users) can decrypt the information data under the same condition as the legitimate receiver. We study the signal-to-noise advantage ratio for decoding by the legitimate user over the eavesdropper in a more generalized scheme when an arbitrary precoder at the transmitter is employed. On the negative side, we show that if the eavesdropper uses a number of receive antennas much larger than the number of legitimate user antennas, then there is no advantage, independent of the precoding scheme employed at the transmitter. On the positive side, for the case where the adversary is limited to have the same number of antennas as legitimate users, we give an O(n2)O\left(n^2\right)O(n2) upper bound on the advantage and show that this bound can be approached using an inverse precoder. For the second cryptosystem, we show that the required security conditions prevent the legitimate user from decoding the plaintext uniquely.
We present an attack on correctness of the latest version of the physical layer cryptography scheme based on massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO). This cryptosystem employs a singular value decomposition (SVD) precoding technique. We show that the required security conditions prevent the legitimate user from decoding the plaintext uniquely. On the positive side, for the case where the eavesdropper is limited to have the same number of antennas as legitimate users, we give an O(n2)\mathcal{O}\left( {{n^2}} \right)O(n2) upper bound on the signal-to-noise advantage ratio for decoding by the legitimate user over the eavesdropper and show that this bound can be approached using an inverse precoder.
We proposed a physical layer secure communication system for massive MIMO systems, utilizing channel entropy as the foundation. Our approach involves extracting a mask key and a flip key from the singular value decomposition (SVD) of the channel matrix. The mask key ensures the protection of the flip key during transmission. By applying a random flip to the constellation diagram of the transmitted message based on the flip key, we introduce a scrambling effect that cannot be deciphered by eavesdroppers. The flip key is securely delivered to the receiver, allowing for the proper demodulation of the message by eliminating the constellation flip. To address the computational burden associated with estimating massive MIMO channels, we employ precoding of the downlink channel guide signal in the system design. This reduces the channel estimation overhead at the terminal. However, it also creates an equivalent channel for the eavesdropper, enabling them to correctly decode the precoded signal and compromise communication security. Our scheme counters this by introducing the constellation diagram flipping, which cannot be extracted by eavesdroppers, thereby preventing correct decoding. Simulation experiments confirm even with a large number of antennas, the eavesdropper is unable to completely counteract the effects of constellation flipping, thus ensuring communication security. In summary, by exploiting the singular value decomposition and employing constellation diagram flipping, our physical layer secure MIMO communication system based on channel entropy achieves secure communication even in the presence of powerful eavesdroppers.
In this paper, we pay our attention towards secure and robust communication in the presence of a Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS)-enhanced mobile eavesdropping attacker in Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) wireless networks. Specifically, we first provide a unifying framework that generalizes specific intelligent wiretap model wherein the passive eavesdropper configured with any number of antennas is potentially mobile and can actively optimize its received signal strength with the help of RIS by intelligently manipulating wiretap channel characteristics. To effectively mitigate this intractable threat, we then propose a novel and lightweight secure communication scheme from the perspective of information theory. The main idea is that the data processing can in some cases be observed as communication channel, and a random bit-flipping scheme is then carefully involved for the legitimate transmitter to minimize the mutual information between the secret message and the passive eavesdropper’s received data. The Singular Value Decomposition (SVD)-based precoding strategy is also implemented to optimize power allocation, and thus ensure that the legitimate receiver is not subject to interference from this random bit-flipping. The corresponding results depict that our secure communication scheme is practically desired, which does not require any a prior knowledge of the eavesdropper’s full instantaneous Channel State Information (ICSI). Perfect acquisition of ICSI is clearly always not affordable, which is further exacerbated by the RIS involved and the potential mobility of the passive eavesdropper that leads to unavoidable fast fading channels. Furthermore, we consider the RIS optimization problem from the eavesdropper’s perspective, and provide RIS phase shift design solutions under different attacking scenarios. Finally, the optimal detection schemes respectively for the legitimate user and the eavesdropper are provided, and comprehensive simulations are presented to verify our theoretical analysis and show the effectiveness and robustness of our secure communication scheme across a wide range of attacking scenarios.
In this paper, a secure multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication technique based on the singular value decomposition (SVD) is investigated. In a previous work, it has been shown that a secure MIMO communication based on the SVD, where interference signal and confidential signal are assigned to two different streams, can achieve positive secrecy rate. In this investigation, it was assumed that the stream assignment information is available at both the legitimate receiver and the eavesdropper. In fact, random stream assignment has a potential to increase the secrecy rate. Specifically, pilot signal is inserted into the pilot time frame and this is used to inform the stream assignment. If either the legitimate receiver or the eavesdropper decodes the pilot signal incorrectly, the receiver attempts to decode the interference signal in the following data time frame even if there is no information about the confidential signal. Therefore, we propose a signaling technique to expand the difference in mutual information between the legitimate receiver and the eavesdropper which leads to enhanced secrecy. In the proposed signaling technique, correlation between pilot signals in successive pilot time frames is provided. Due to this correlation, correct pilot signal decoding in the current pilot time frame requires the correct pilot signal decoding in the previous pilot time frame. Numerical result shows that the propose method can significantly decrease the mutual information between the transmitter and the eavesdropper which leads to increased the secrecy rate.