This paper investigates the physical-layer security for water-to-air (W2A) visible light communication (VLC). The impacts of surface fluctuation and underwater scattering on the channel gain are theoretically analyzed, which is verified in a laboratory W2A-VLC link. The statistical properties of wave slope under experimental conditions are measured by image processing and the probability density function of the slope can be approximated by a logistic distribution. We observe that dynamic waves can cause information leakage and experimental results indicate that the probability of secure communication increases from 90.39% to 96.18% as the eavesdropper’s elevation increases from 1.15 m to 1.42 m, which are approximately consistent with the numerical results. To investigate the parameters affecting the secrecy performance, several secrecy performance metrics are numerically calculated under different wave intensities, eavesdropper’s locations, divergence angles of LED, underwater scattering coefficients and wavelengths of transmitted beam. It is seen that the secrecy performance is degraded as the wave intensity increases, while random scattering can mitigate the water surface fluctuations and reduce the probability of information leakage.
This paper investigates the physical-layer security for water-to-air (W2A) visible light communication (VLC). The impacts of surface fluctuation and underwater scattering on the channel gain are theoretically analyzed, which is verified in a laboratory W2A-VLC link. The statistical properties of wave slope under experimental conditions are measured by image processing and the probability density function of the slope can be approximated by a logistic distribution. We observe that dynamic waves can cause information leakage and experimental results indicate that the probability of secure communication increases from 90.39% to 96.18% as the eavesdropper’s elevation increases from 1.15 m to 1.42 m, which are approximately consistent with the numerical results. To investigate the parameters affecting the secrecy performance, several secrecy performance metrics are numerically calculated under different wave intensities, eavesdropper’s locations, divergence angles of LED, underwater scattering coefficients and wavelengths of transmitted beam. It is seen that the secrecy performance is degraded as the wave intensity increases, while random scattering can mitigate the water surface fluctuations and reduce the probability of information leakage.
In this paper, we propose a physical layer security (PLS) scheme based on superposition modulation for water-to-air (W2A) visible light communication (VLC). We characterize the high correlation between W2A and air-to-water (A2W) link gains from ray tracing simulation and experiments. The proposed scheme selects the modulation order and superposition parameter based on the high correlation between the W2A and A2W link gains. The scheme performance is studied by exploring its immunity against different types of attacks. Based on the link gains from real measurements, it is shown that under random attack Eve's SER exceeds 0.77 when Eve's signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) varies from 5 dB to 30 dB, and under correlated attack Eve's SER decreases only for a high correlation coefficient when Eve is close enough to Bob, which is unrealistic for eavesdropping. In addition, the entropy of potential set under post-processing attack is derived. For intelligent attack, two unsupervised algorithms, namely K-means clustering and expectation maximization (EM) algorithm, are adopted for modulation identification. The distributions of Eve' SER under all four attacks are investigated based on the measured link gains in the laboratory environment, which demonstrates that intelligent attack with K-means clustering possesses the highest eavesdropping capability. However, more numerical results show that for intelligent attack with K-means clustering under wavy water surface, the proportion of the case where Eve has a higher SER than Bob is lower than 0.5 only when Eve lies between Alice and Bob with small horizontal distance, which is unrealistic for eavesdropping operation.
Over recent years, visible light communications (VLC) has gained prominence as a promising alternative to traditional RF communication, offering advantages in terms of bandwidth and security. This paper investigates the physical-layer security for a practical indoor VLC system where the positions of a legitimate receiver (Bob) and an eavesdropper (Eve) are considered to be random within their circular receiving planes. For this system model, the statistics of the VLC channel gains are obtained using which, closed-form expressions for the secrecy outage probability are derived. The analytical results, validated through Monte Carlo simulations, demonstrate the impact of key system parameters, namely signal-to-noise ratio, Bob and Eve relative positions, and the target secrecy rate on the SOP performance.
This letter investigates the secrecy performance in visible light communication (VLC) in the presence of randomly located colluding eavesdroppers (EDs). Colluding EDs can combine their observations and degrade the secrecy performance of the VLC systems. Utilizing the numerical inversion of a characteristic function, the probability distribution of the combined signal-to-noise ratio of colluding EDs is analyzed. The closed-form expression of the secrecy outage probability is derived and verified by Monte Carlo simulations.
This paper proposes a secrecy enhancement mechanism for multiuser visible light communication (VLC) systems. Thanks to the inherent advantages of visible light that it cannot penetrate opaque walls and its channel gain largely depends on the distance, VLC systems can serve multiple users at a time with high security and dense spatial reuse. Nevertheless, in the presence of multiple users, the interference caused by other users' signals should be carefully considered when analyzing the secrecy rate and data rate performance measures. By employing a continuous LED model, we formulate an optimization problem to find the optimal set of LEDs that should be used for communication such that the average secrecy rate for the secured user is maximized while satisfying data rate requirements for the other ordinary users. Numerical results are provided to verify that the relative locations of multiple users, the spatial distribution of a random eavesdropper, and the required data rates are significant factors that affect the secrecy performance in multiuser VLC systems.
Optical wireless communication (OWC) has been recognized as a promising solution for establishing high-speed, low-latency data connectivity between air and water. During the propagation of optical beams across dynamic water surfaces, random scattering and refraction can result in information leakage issues, significantly increasing the probability of an adversary listener (Willie) detecting the signal transmission. In this paper, we investigate the covert performance of bidirectional air-water cross-boundary OWC systems under the detection of arbitrary underwater/aerial Willie for the first time. To characterize the detection accuracy at Willie and communication quality between a legitimate transmitter (Alice) and a legitimate receiver (Bob), the covert performance metrics including the covertness outage probability and covert throughput are computed based on the theoretical derivations of channel gain under dynamic wave, surface refraction, and particle absorption and scattering. The numerical simulation reveals the variation patterns of covert performance metrics with respect to multiple environmental and system parameters, which shows that wave intensity and transmitted beam’s divergence angle have opposite effects on detection performance of Willie locating at different positions, and both the optical wavelength beyond blue-green band and strong ambient light can increase Willie’s detection uncertainty. Furthermore, it can be seen that the upper bound on covertness outage probability reaches 1 and the achievable covert throughput approaches 0 in some cases, while covert threat regions exist in both atmospheric and underwater areas within several meters, which indicates that covert transmission strategy and system parameters are required to be further designed and optimized to enhance communication security.
In order to improve the security performance of multiuser visible light communication (VLC) and facilitate the secure application of optical wireless communication technology in Internet-of-Things, we investigate the physical-layer security in a multiuser VLC system with non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA). When the light-emitting diode (LED) transmitter communicates with multiple legitimate users by downlink NOMA, both single eavesdropper and multi-eavesdropper scenarios are considered. In the presence of single eavesdropper, based on transmission characteristics of the optical wireless channel, with known instantaneous channel state information (CSI) of the NOMA legitimate channels and statistical CSI of the eavesdropper channel, an exact expression of secrecy outage probability (SOP) is derived, which acts as a benchmark of the security performance to guide selecting or optimizing parameters of the LED transmitter and the photodiode receiver of NOMA legitimate users. In the multi-eavesdropper case, based on the spatial distribution of legitimate users and eavesdroppers, the SOP is obtained via a stochastic geometry theory, so as to guide the NOMA legitimate users to keep away from the area with high eavesdropper density. For typical parameters of the indoor LED transmitter and the PD receiver, simulation results show that the SOP performance improves with the increasing of LED transmission power or transmission signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in both scenarios. Specifically, in the single eavesdropper case, enlarging the channel condition difference of user groups or deviating the eavesdropper from the given user group can improve the SOP performance, and for a given NOMA legitimate user, the SOP eventually settles around 0.2 while the semiangle at half illuminance of the LED varies between 15° to 60°. In the multi-eavesdropper case, we can get a better SOP performance when reducing the eavesdropper density or the semi-angle at half illuminance of the LED for a given eavesdropper density.