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IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security

Physical Layer Secure MIMO Communications Against Eavesdroppers With Arbitrary Number of Antennas

Jie Tang, Long Jiao, Kai Zeng, Hong Wen, Kaiyu Qin

Published Aug 11, 2020• 34 citations
Publisher

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1109/tifs.2020.3015548

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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.
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.
This chapter considers securing wireless communications at the physical layer using multiple antennas. In particular, the multiple antenna (MIMO) wiretap channel is presented and its secrecy capacity is provided. Further investigation of the high-SNR characterization of the secrecy capacity, i.e., secure degrees of freedom, reveals that the secrecy capacity of the MIMO wiretap channel does not scale with the transmit power when the eavesdropper has an advantage over the legitimate transmitter in the number of antennas. An external multi-antenna cooperative jammer terminal is introduced to the channel model in order to improve its secrecy capacity scaling with power. The secure degrees of freedom for this new multi-terminal multi-antenna channel is characterized. While for these models the eavesdropper channel state information is known at the legitimate terminals, the chapter next removes this assumption and presents results that utilize multiple antennas in order to provide secure communications irrespective of the eavesdropper channel state. An achievable strong secrecy rate and the secure degrees of freedom characterization for the MIMO wiretap channel when the eavesdropper channel is arbitrary, varying, and unknown at the legitimate terminals are presented. Finally, the extension of this model to the two-user multiple access MIMO wiretap channel is considered and its secure degrees of freedom region is characterized. Introduction The wiretap channel and the notion of secrecy capacity, introduced in [1] and generalized by [2], have provided the framework for physical layer design for wireless channels with information theoretic guarantees against eavesdropping. A natural model in wireless communications is one which utilizes multiple antennas for transmission and reception at each node. The improvement in secrecy rate that can be obtained using multiple antennas in a point-to-point channel with an eavesdropper has been studied extensively in several references, including [3, 4]. Specifically, the secrecy capacity of the Gaussian model consisting of a multiple antenna legitimate transmitter, a multiple antenna legitimate receiver, and a multiple antenna eavesdropper, termed the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wiretap channel, has been identified in full generality in [5, 6].
Polar codes have been proven to be capacity achieving for any binary-input discrete memoryless channel, while at the same time they can reassure secure and reliable transmission over the single-input single-output wireless channel. However, the use of polar codes to secure multiple-antenna transmission and reception has not yet been reported in the open literature. In this paper, we assume a multiple-input multiple-output wiretap channel, where the legitimate receiver and the eavesdropper are equipped with the same number of antennas. We introduce a protocol that exploits the properties of both physical and media access control layer security by employing polar coding and encryption techniques in a hybrid manner in order to guarantee secure transmission. A novel security technique is also proposed, where a cryptographic key is generated based on the information transmitted and renewed every transmission block without the need for a separate key exchange method. Finally, to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed protocol, we prove the weak and strong security conditions, and we provide a practical method to achieve computational security for the cases where these conditions cannot be established.
A scheme based on projection operator is proposed to guarantee the information theoretical security in MIMO physical layer transmission.The transmitter has multiple antennas and is able to simultaneously transmit separately information bearing signal to the intended receiver and randomized interference to the eavesdropper in the projection space.An iterative algorithm of power allocation between them is given according to the secret channel capacity criteria.Based on the special statistical distributions of the adversary’s received signal,the indeterminacy of its blind deconvolution is proved.Numerical results indicate that the secret channel capacity of this scheme is enhanced with reduced bit error rate at the target user,while the eavesdropper can not demodulate correctly.
Traditional approaches for providing confidentiality of wirelessly transmitted signals are often based on cryptographic techniques. While these techniques ensure that messages are encrypted and secured against eavesdropping, they are not sufficient to protect important transmission attributes at the physical (PHY) layer. Specifically, several elds in the headers of PHY and medium access control (MAC) frames are typically sent unencrypted to maintain proper protocol functionality (e.g., sender/receiver identification). As a result, they leak side-channel information (SCI), including payload size, frequency and phase oset, modulation and coding scheme, identities of communication nodes, frame type, transmission rate, etc. These SCI can be exploited by an adversary to launch various passive (eavesdropping) and active (jamming) attacks. To complement cryptographic techniques used at upper layers and prevent the leakage of SCI at the PHY/MAC layers, PHY-layer security techniques have been introduced. These techniques exploit the characteristics of the wireless channel along with multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technologies, in which multiple transmitting and receiving antennas are utilized to prevent information leakage to eavesdroppers and/or avoid jamming attacks. In particular, if the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) at an adversary is lower than the one at a legitimate receiver, secure communication can be achieved through the so-called wiretap coding. MIMO systems enable the transmitter and/or the receiver to generate artificial noise, called friendly jamming (FJ), so as to reduce the SINR at the adversary without impacting the SINR at the legitimate receiver. In this dissertation, we focus on exploring the security threats to next-generation wireless systems. We develop MIMO-based PHY-layer security methods to achieve reliable and secret communications in these systems. First, we consider a broadcast channel, in which a multi-antenna transmitter (Alice) sends K confidential information signals to K legitimate receivers (Bobs) in the presence of L eavesdropping devices (Eves). Alice uses MIMO precoding to generate the information signals along with her own Tx-based friendly jamming (TxFJ). Interference at each Bob is removed via a technique called MIMO zero-forcing. This TxFJ, however, leaves an eavesdropping \vulnerability region" in the proximity of each Bob, which can be exploited by a nearby Eve. Specically, because of the high correlation in the channel state information (CSI) at a Bob and nearby Eves, the TxFJ becomes less effective in preventing eavesdropping at these Eves. We address this problem by augmenting TxFJ with receiver-based friendly jamming (RxFJ), generated by each Bob. Specifically, we allow each Bob to use self-interference suppression (SIS) techniques to transmit a friendly jamming signal while simultaneously receiving an information signal over the same channel. These SIS techniques exploit circulators to attenuate the self-interference power of RxFJ at Bobs and utilize analog/digital cancellation methods to clean out any remaining residual self-interference. Considering the resulting broadcast channel, we rst study a two-user scenario and develop a secrecy encoding scheme for constructing the signals intended to two Bobs. We characterize the corresponding achievable secrecy sum-rate and formulate an optimization problem to maximize this metric. We then extend our approach to K-user scenarios and study a power minimization problem. Particularly, in our analysis we minimize the powers allocated to information and friendly jamming signals (both TxFJ and RxFJ) while guaranteeing individual secrecy rates for various Bobs. The problem is solved for the cases when the eavesdropper's CSI (ECSI) is known or unknown (but with a known distribution). Simulations show the effectiveness of the proposed solutions. Furthermore, we discuss how to schedule transmissions when the rate requirements need to be satised on average rather than instantaneously. In low and high power regime, a scheduling algorithm that serves only the strongest receivers is shown to outperform the one that schedules all receivers. Next, we consider a single-cell massive MIMO system in which a base station (BS) with a large number of antennas transmits simultaneously to several single antenna users. The BS acquires the CSI for various receivers using uplink pilot transmissions. We demonstrate the vulnerability of the CSI estimation process to a pilot-contamination (PC) attack that aims at minimizing the sum-rate of downlink transmissions by contaminating uplink pilots. We rst study PC attacks for two downlink power allocation strategies under the assumption that the attacker knows the locations of the BS and its users. Later on, we relax this assumption and consider the case when such knowledge is probabilistic. The formulated problems are solved using stochastic optimization, Lagrangian minimization, and game-theoretic methods. A closed-form solution for a special case of the problem is obtained. Furthermore, we analyze the \achievable individual secrecy rates" under PC attacks, and provide an upper-bound on these rates. We also study this scenario without a priori knowledge of user locations at the attacker by introducing chance constraints. Another attack model is considered, where the attacker generates jamming signals in both the CSI estimation and data transmission phases by exploiting inband full-duplex techniques. Our results indicate that such attacks can degrade the throughput of a massive MIMO system by more than 50%, and reduce fairness among users significantly.
Addressing the problem of wireless physical layer security transmission for finite alphabet input systems,a spatial modulation secure transmission method is proposed.On the basis of information theory,the method utilizes the receive antenna indices of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system to bear information,and randomizes the eavesdropper’s equivalent channel by switching the receive antennas,which can guarantee physical layer security transmission.First,the different receiving performances of the legitimate user and eavesdropper are analyzed in the spatial modulation secure transmission system.Second,the mutual information and secrecy mutual information of the transmission system are calculated,and two sufficient conditions that ensure positive secrecy mutual information are pointed out.Finally,an estimation algorithm of mutual information is provided.Moreover,the symmetry of finite alphabet set is exploited to decrease the computational complexity.Theoretical analysis and numerical simulation results verify the availability of the security transmission method.