Ensuring secure communication for internet of things (IoT) has drawn much attention because of the limitation in the use of conventional cryptographic techniques owing to the unique features of IoT devices such as low complexity, lightweight computing, and power constraints. Physical layer security (PLS) has the potential to provide security solutions that are suitable for such applications. In this article, an efficient PLS approach is proposed for providing secure communication against external and internal eavesdroppers in a downlink multi-carrier IoT communication system. The system consists of a transmitter with a single active antenna (and a single radio frequency chain) that is trying to communicate with two single-antenna IoT devices in the presence of a passive eavesdropper. In the proposed algorithm, frequency selective channel based pre-coder matrices and dual-transmission approach are jointly employed to provide simple and secure communication without complex computational processing at the IoT devices. Simulation results showed that the proposed algorithm can provide security against internal and external eavesdroppers and is suitable for IoT devices.
Ensuring secure communication for internet of things (IoT) has drawn much attention because of the limitation in the use of conventional cryptographic techniques owing to the unique features of IoT devices such as low complexity, lightweight computing, and power constraints. Physical layer security (PLS) has the potential to provide security solutions that are suitable for such applications. In this article, an efficient PLS approach is proposed for providing secure communication against external and internal eavesdroppers in a downlink multi-carrier IoT communication system. The system consists of a transmitter with a single active antenna (and a single radio frequency chain) that is trying to communicate with two single-antenna IoT devices in the presence of a passive eavesdropper. In the proposed algorithm, frequency selective channel based pre-coder matrices and dual-transmission approach are jointly employed to provide simple and secure communication without complex computational processing at the IoT devices. Simulation results showed that the proposed algorithm can provide security against internal and external eavesdroppers and is suitable for IoT devices.
Considering the advancements of the internet of things (IoT) in 6G and beyond communications, data transmission security in IoT devices has received extensive interest because of their significant features, such as low computational complexity, led by low power requirements. In such devices, the conventional cryptographic techniques may fail to provide secure communication. To fight this drawback, physical layer security (PLS) has remarkable potential to provide security solutions suitable for such applications. In this work, a highly effective PLS technique is proposed for providing secure communication against external and internal eavesdroppers in a downlink multi-cell, multi-user, and multi-carrier IoT communication system. In our proposed system, we considered two base stations, where each base station uses a single radio frequency (RF) chain to link two antennas that are used for the transmission of data. Further, we transmit the data in two rounds, and each round of transmission occurs through a single active antenna of each base station. A different antenna is used for each round of transmission to communicate with two single antenna IoT devices/users in the presence of a passive eavesdropper. In the proposed algorithm, frequency selective channel-based pre-coder matrices and the dual transmission approach are jointly employed. The dual-transmission is performed simultaneously from two base stations to provide security against internal and external eavesdroppers. The proposed system is suitable for IoT-based applications. Also, the potential capabilities of our proposed algorithm are proved by extensive mathematical and simulation analysis.
Establishing robust cybersecurity for Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems poses significant challenges for system operators due to IoT resource constraints, trade-offs between security and performance, diversity of applications, and their security requirements, usability, and scalability. This article introduces a physical-layer security (PLS) approach that enables IoT devices to maintain specified levels of information confidentiality against wireless channel eavesdropping threats. This work proposes applying PLS active defense mechanisms utilizing spectrum-sharing schemes combined with fair scheduling and power management algorithms to mitigate the risk of eavesdropping attacks on resource-constrained IoT environments. Specifically, an IoT device communicating over an insecure wireless channel will utilize intentional noise signals transmitted alongside the actual IoT information signal. The intentional noise signal will appear to an eavesdropper (EVE) as additional noise, reducing the EVE’s signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and increasing the EVE’s outage probability, thereby restricting their capacity to decode the transmitted IoT information, resulting in better protection for the confidentiality of the IoT device’s transmission. The proposed communication strategy serves as a complementary solution to existing security methods. Analytical and numerical analyses presented in this article validate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy, demonstrating that IoT devices can achieve the desired levels of confidentiality.
Physical-layer security (PLS) has become an intriguing technology to address eavesdropping issues in Internet of Things (IoT) systems owing to its low complexity and latency. As wireless communication technology and computing capabilities advance by leaps and bounds, eavesdroppers have enhanced eavesdropping capabilities. They can analyse the environment and move to find better locations for eavesdropping. To mitigate the significant impact of multiple intelligent eavesdroppers extremely close to the device-constrained transmitters in the uplink multiple-input-multiple-output IoT systems, we exploit time-domain artificial noise (AN) in the PLS design and formulate a game problem against the intelligent eavesdroppers. First, we derive the optimal closed-form solution for eavesdroppers and propose a low complexity difference of the convex (LCDC) algorithm to obtain the optimal strategy of the legitimate users and the access point equipped with a zero-forcing receiver. For general linear receivers, we propose a successive convex approximation (SCA) algorithm for the game problem. Simulations are conducted to verify the convergence and effectiveness of our proposed algorithms. The system secrecy performance of the time-domain AN is much better than that of the frequency-domain AN with single-antenna transmitters.
The growth of internet-of-things (IoT) inspired use cases in different run of the mill environments such as cities, industries, healthcare, agriculture, and transportation, has led to a greater desire for safer IoT data gathering and storage. However, securing IoT is challenging due to form-factor, complexity, energy, and connectivity limitations. Conventional coding-based security techniques are unsuitable for ultra-reliable low-latency and energy-efficient communication in IoT. Numerous research studies on physical layer security (PLS) techniques for fifth generation (5G) have emerged recently, but not all of the solutions can be used in IoT networks due to complexity limitations. Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is billed as a possible technology to solve connectivity and latency requirements in IoT. In this study, we exploit the power allocation characteristics of NOMA to enhance security in a downlink deviceto-device (D2D) decode and forward (DF) IoT network infiltrated by an eavesdropper. Our performance metric of choice is the secrecy outage probability (SOP). We formulate exact SOP results for different users. Simulation results demonstrate the positive impact of NOMA on SOP in a D2D IoT-NOMA network.
A secure downlink transmission system which is exposed to multiple eavesdroppers and is appropriate for Internet of Things (IoT) applications is considered. A worst case scenario is assumed, in the sense that, in order to enhance their interception ability all eavesdroppers are located close to each other, near the controller and collude to form joint receive beamforming. For such a system, a novel cooperative nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) secure transmission scheme for which an IoT device with a stronger channel condition acts as an energy harvesting relay in order to assist a second IoT device operating under weaker channel conditions, is proposed and its performance is analyzed and evaluated. A secrecy sum rate (SSR) maximization problem is formulated and solved under three constraints: 1) transmit power; 2) successive interference cancellation; and 3) quality of service. By considering both passive and active eavesdroppers scenarios, two optimization schemes are proposed to improve the overall system SSR. On the one hand, for the passive eavesdropper scenario, an artificial noise-aided secure beamforming scheme is proposed. Since this optimization problem is nonconvex, instead of using traditional but highly complex, brute-force 2-D search, it is conveniently transformed into a convex one by using an epigraph reformulation. On the other hand, for the active multiantennas eavesdroppers’ scenario, the orthogonal-projection-based beamforming scheme is considered, and by employing the successive convex approximation method, a suboptimal solution is proposed. Furthermore, since for single antenna transmission the orthogonal-projection-based scheme may not be applicable a simple power control scheme is proposed. Various performance evaluation results obtained by means of computer simulations have verified that the proposed schemes outperform other benchmark schemes in terms of SSR performance.
In this article, we propose a lightweight security scheme for ensuring both information confidentiality and transmission resiliency in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) communication. A single-antenna transmitter communicates with a half-duplex single-antenna receiver in the presence of a sophisticated multiple-antenna-aided passive eavesdropper and a multiple-antenna-assisted hostile jammer (HJ). A low-complexity artificial noise (AN) injection scheme is proposed for drowning out the eavesdropper. Furthermore, for enhancing the resilience against HJ attacks, the legitimate nodes exploit their own local observations of the wireless channel as the source of randomness to agree on shared secret keys. The secret key is utilized for the frequency hopping (FH) sequence of the proposed communication system. We then proceed to derive a new closed-form expression for the achievable secret key rate (SKR) and the ergodic secrecy rate (ESR) for characterizing the secrecy benefits of our proposed scheme, in terms of both information secrecy and transmission resiliency. Moreover, the optimal power sharing between the AN and the message signal is investigated with the objective of enhancing the secrecy rate. Finally, through extensive simulations, we demonstrate that our proposed system model outperforms the state-of-the-art transmission schemes in terms of secrecy and resiliency. Several numerical examples and discussions are also provided to offer further engineering insights.