The ubiquity of wireless communication systems has resulted in extensive concern regarding their security issues.A practical secure transmission scheme based on under-sampling spectrum-sparse signals is designed. Secure transmission is initialized as the intended receiver transmits a pilot signal for the transmitter, to perform channel sounding and clock synchronization according to the channel reciprocal principle. Then, sampling clock offset compensation and precoding method based on channel state information(CSI) can be conducted at the transmitter’s end. Because the intended receiver adopts an under-sampling method based on active aliasing which depends very sensitively on accurate sampling clock and CSI, the eavesdroppers can hardly intercept the signal. Closed form expression of symbol error rate(SER) at the intended receiver’s end and secrecy capacity in fading wiretap channel has been derived. Numerical evaluation and simulations are carried out to validate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.
The ubiquity of wireless communication systems has resulted in extensive concern regarding their security issues.A practical secure transmission scheme based on under-sampling spectrum-sparse signals is designed. Secure transmission is initialized as the intended receiver transmits a pilot signal for the transmitter, to perform channel sounding and clock synchronization according to the channel reciprocal principle. Then, sampling clock offset compensation and precoding method based on channel state information(CSI) can be conducted at the transmitter’s end. Because the intended receiver adopts an under-sampling method based on active aliasing which depends very sensitively on accurate sampling clock and CSI, the eavesdroppers can hardly intercept the signal. Closed form expression of symbol error rate(SER) at the intended receiver’s end and secrecy capacity in fading wiretap channel has been derived. Numerical evaluation and simulations are carried out to validate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.
Recent years have been marked by an enormous growth of wireless communication networks and an extensive use of wireless applications. In return, this phenomenal expansion induced more concerns about the privacy and the security of the users. Physical layer security is one of the most promising solutions that were proposed to enhance the security of next generation wireless systems. The fundamental idea behind this technique is to exploit the randomness and the fluctuations of the wireless channel to achieve security without conditional assumptions on the computational capabilities of the eavesdropper. In fact, while these elements have traditionally been associated with signal deterioration, physical layer security uses them to ensure the confidentiality of the users. Nevertheless, these technical virtues rely heavily on perhaps idealistic channel state information assumptions. In that regard, the aim of this thesis is to look at the physical layer security paradigm from the channel uncertainty perspective. In particular, we discuss the ergodic secrecy capacity of different wiretap channels when the transmitter is hampered by the imperfect knowledge of the channel state information (CSI). We consider two prevalent causes of uncertainty for the CSI at transmitter (CSIT); either an error of estimation occurs at the transmitter and he can only base his coding and the transmission strategies on a noisy version of the CSI, or the CSI feedback link has a limited capacity and the legitimate receivers can only inform the transmitter about the quantized CSI. We investigate both the single-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wiretap channel and the multi-user broadcast wiretap channel. In the latter scenario, we distinguish between two situations: multiple messages transmission and common message transmission. We also discuss the broadcast channel with confidential messages (BCCM) where the transmitter has one common message to be transmitted to two users and one secret message intended to only one of them. In all cases, we show that by appropriately designing the coding and the transmission schemes, a secure communication can still be achieved even with an imperfect knowledge of the CSIT.
The concept of physical layer security builds on the pivotal idea of turning the channel's imperfections, such as noise and fading, into a source of security. This is established through appropriately designed coding techniques and signal processing strategies. In this vein, it has been shown that fading channels can enhance the transmission of confidential information and that a secure communication can be achieved even when the channel to the eavesdropper is better than the main channel. However, to fully benefit from what fading has to offer, the knowledge of the channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) is of primordial importance. In practical wireless communication systems, CSIT is usually obtained, prior to data transmission, through CSI feedback sent by the receivers. The channel links over which this feedback information is sent can be either noisy, rate-limited, or delayed, leading to CSIT uncertainty. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of recent and ongoing research works on physical layer security with CSIT uncertainty. We focus on both information theoretic and signal processing approaches to the topic when the uncertainty concerns the channel to the wiretapper or the channel to the legitimate receiver. Moreover, we present a classification of the research works based on the considered channel uncertainty. Mainly, we distinguish between the cases when the uncertainty comes from an estimation error of the CSIT, from a CSI feedback link with limited capacity, or from an outdated CSI.
Secure wireless communication has always been a hot research topic due to the vulnerabilities associated with wireless channel. Physical layer aspects to secure wireless communication, based on the information-theoretic security and signal processing methods have gained much recognition over the last decade. Specifically, artificial noise (AN) methods are assumed to be good means for providing security against potential eavesdroppers in multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems and/or relay systems. However, there are still a large number of nodes which do not have multi-antennas or support sophisticated protocols in wireless networks. In this paper, a novel AN-aided method is proposed to secure wireless communications between the legitimate users (not equipped with multiple antennas) in the presence of an eavesdropper. In this proposed method frequency selective property of wireless channel is exploited. The basic principle is same in which transmitter generate random AN signal utilizing some of the transmission power to confuse eavesdropper. However artificial noise is generated in such a way that it appears to be zero at the sampling time, only for the legitimate receiver while degrading eavesdropper's channel. Artificial noise is specified using the channel state information (CSI) of the legitimate users' link. However, the secrecy of proposed scheme doesn't depend on the secrecy of CSI. Extensive simulation suggests that the proposed scheme can effectively utilized for securing wireless transmissions.
Achieving secure transmission in wireless network is a significantly important research topic. Classic cryptography encrypts a confidential message to an unreadable cipher message. Thus only the authentic receiver with correct secrecy key is able to decrypt the message. However, with the growing computational capability of adversaries, the requirement of secrecy key generation and distribution is getting stringent. Another method to achieve wireless security, which has attracted much attention in recent years, is through physical layer processing, named physical layer security. In a typical wiretap channel model consisting of a transmitter, a legal receiver and an adversary (illegal receiver), early works have proven that it is possible to achieve positive secrecy rate using multiple antenna techniques, such as beamforming, at the transmitter. In this thesis, we focus on two types of malicious behaviors of the adversary: passive eavesdropping and active attack. For the passive eavesdropping, we first consider the multi-input-single-output (MISO) wiretap channel, in which the legitimate transmitter utilizes the artificial noise aided precoding strategy to maximize the achievable secrecy rate of the channel. Both scenarios of known and unknown channel state information (CSI) for the eavesdropper channels are considered. By deriving the closed-form expression of ergodic secrecy rate, we prove that there exists an optimal power ratio between the information signal and the artificial noise. We then extend our study to a four-node fading channel model in a wireless relay network, which includes two single-antenna users, one single-antenna eavesdropper and one relay node equipped with multiple antennas. By studying the decode-and-forward (DF) scheme, cooperative jamming (CJ) scheme and one proposed hybrid relay scheme, relay-and-jamming (RJ), we aims to find the optimal relay scheme with the condition that the transmitter and the relay node are under individual power constraints and the CSI of the illegitimate channel is only statistically known. Our analysis shows that the hybrid RJ scheme is optimal when the transmitter has a relatively small power budget and/or the transmitter is far away from the intended receiver. Besides the passive eavesdropping, the adversary could also choose the active attack. The pilot spoofing attack is one active attack conducted by the adversary during the channel estimation phase of the legitimate transmission. In practical systems, the pilot signals are usually known \textit{a priori} and repeatedly used information. In this attack, an intelligent adversary spoofs the transmitter on the estimation of CSI by sending the identical pilot signal as the legitimate receiver. By doing so, the adversary could obtain a larger channel rate in the data transmission phase, and also drastically weaken the strength of the received signal at the legitimate receiver if the adversary utilizes large enough power. Due to the serious consequences caused by such an attack, we first propose an energy ratio detector (ERD) that explores the asymmetry of received signal power levels at the transmitter and the legitimate receiver when the attack occurs. Our analysis shows that the ERD could provide very high probability of detection with certain requirement on the false alarming probability. Furthermore, we design a two-way training based scheme to provide not only attack detection but also secure transmission. The two-way training based detector (TWTD) exploits the intrusive component created by the adversary, followed by a secure beamforming-assisted data transmission. In addition to the good detection performance, our scheme could estimate both legitimate and illegitimate channels, with which the beamforming could be designed for data transmission.
Wireless communication security can be enhanced by leveraging the characteristics of the physical (PHY) layer, where discriminatory scrambling can be employed at the symbol level to either improve the signal quality of the legitimate receiver or degrade that of the eavesdroppers. However, in the presence of multiple passive eavesdroppers with more antennas than the transmitter, the transmitted signals can still be reliably separated from random disturbances. To mitigate this challenge, we propose a two-dimensional vectorized secure transmission scheme. Unlike existing transmission schemes (where the same data symbol is sent over each antenna with a predesigned complex weight at a time), in the proposed scheme, a sequence of data symbols in a predefined order (named symbol vector) is first pre-superposed through pre-coding with a random complex matrix prior to been sent as a vector in parallel over each transmitting antenna at a time. As a result, physical randomness of the legitimate channel is introduced into the received signals at passive eavesdroppers in the pre-coding procedure. Moreover, to ensure that transmitted data symbols can be recovered in the right order, each symbol vector is sent repeatedly, according to the principle of maximum entropy. To ensure the intended receiver can recover the transmitted symbol vector, the random pre-coding matrices are selected such that a linear constraint imposed by the CSI of the legitimate channel is satisfied. In addition, an extended maximum likelihood (ML) detection method is developed for the desired receiver while the random pre-coding matrices are not required to be transmitted. We then analyze its security based on the signal detection theory to demonstrate that the intended receiver can recover the transmitted symbol vectors while the eavesdroppers are not capable of doing so. We also evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme to demonstrate its effectiveness.
This paper proposes secrecy-enhancing signaling schemes to exploit the advantages of having only channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter, but no (or limited) CSI at the receiver and the eavesdropper in fast-fading wiretap channels and also in wiretap channels with Gaussian interference. With only CSI at the transmitter, the transmit signaling can be designed to precompensate for the distortion or the interference on the main channel to facilitate decoding at the receiver while leaving the eavesdropper confused by the uncertainties of its own channel. In fading wiretap channels, truncated channel-inversion and phase-compensation schemes are proposed to achieve this task. Here, truncation is used so that transmission occurs only when the main channel is sufficiently reliable. In wiretap channels with Gaussian interference, a truncated interference-nulling scheme is proposed to enable interference precancellation at the transmitter. The proposed signaling schemes exploit the advantages of having only CSI at the transmitter without employing more complex encoding schemes. The achievable secrecy rates are derived using Gaussian input, and approximate expressions are proposed for the optimization of system parameters. The effectiveness of the proposed transmission schemes and the advantages of having only CSI at the transmitter are demonstrated through numerical simulations.