Security issues for traditional wireless networks have been considered as a very important research area, and have taken a considerable attention for several years due to the broadcast nature of the wireless medium, which makes attacks more likely to happen than in wireline systems. Most of the studies in this area focus on the security in the higher layers in the protocol stack via the use of cryptography and key management. The main idea of these security approaches is based on the limited computational power of the eavesdroppers. With the advent of the infrastructureless networks such as mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), further challenges have appeared which make the nodes more vulnerable to attacks. Among these challenges are the absence of centralized hardware for security problems, the multihop routes that the transmitted information should follow, and the power-limited terminals [152]. Therefore, to cope with these limitations, physical layer security (or informationtheoretic security) has gained a considerable attention in the last few years. The goal of physical layer security is to allow the source to confidentially communicate with the legitimate destination, while the eavesdropper cannot interpret the source information, without any assumption for the eavesdropper nodes such as the computational power, or the available information. From an information-theoretic standpoint, the achieved source-destination confidential rate is called the achievable secrecy rate.
Security issues for traditional wireless networks have been considered as a very important research area, and have taken a considerable attention for several years due to the broadcast nature of the wireless medium, which makes attacks more likely to happen than in wireline systems. Most of the studies in this area focus on the security in the higher layers in the protocol stack via the use of cryptography and key management. The main idea of these security approaches is based on the limited computational power of the eavesdroppers. With the advent of the infrastructureless networks such as mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), further challenges have appeared which make the nodes more vulnerable to attacks. Among these challenges are the absence of centralized hardware for security problems, the multihop routes that the transmitted information should follow, and the power-limited terminals [152]. Therefore, to cope with these limitations, physical layer security (or informationtheoretic security) has gained a considerable attention in the last few years. The goal of physical layer security is to allow the source to confidentially communicate with the legitimate destination, while the eavesdropper cannot interpret the source information, without any assumption for the eavesdropper nodes such as the computational power, or the available information. From an information-theoretic standpoint, the achieved source-destination confidential rate is called the achievable secrecy rate.
In virtually all communication systems, the issues of authentication, confidentiality, and privacy are handled in the upper layers of the protocol stack using variations of private-key and public-key cryptosystems. These cryptosystems are usually based upon mathematical operations, such as the factorization into prime factors, believed hard to perform for an attacker with limited computational power; hence, we refer to the security provided by these systems as computational security. While computational security has a clear trackrecord of proven effectiveness, it may be difficult to implement in some emerging network architectures. For example, the advent of wireless networks has fostered the development of mobile adhoc networks comprised of many devices with heterogenous capabilities; the wide range of computing power available in the devices makes it difficult to deploy a public-key infrastructure. In contrast with the established practice of computational security, many results from information theory, signal processing, and cryptography suggest that there is much security to be gained by accounting for the imperfections of the physical layer when designing secure systems. For instance, while noise and fading are usually treated as impairments in wireless communications, information-theoretic results show that they can be harnessed to “hide” messages from a potential eavesdropper or authenticate devices, without requiring a shared secret key. Such results, if they can be implemented in a costefficient way without sacrificing much data rate, call for the design of security solutions at the physical layer itself to complement computational security mechanisms.
The use of physical layer methods for improving the security of wireless links has recently become the focus of a considerable research effort. Such methods can be used in combination with cryptography to enhance the exchange of confidential messages over a wireless medium in the presence of unauthorized eavesdroppers, or they can be used to enable secrecy in the absence of shared secret keys through the use of coding strategies, jamming or beamforming. Indeed, one of the driving forces behind the recent emergence of physical layer techniques for security is the push toward adding extra degrees of freedom in the form of multiple antennas at the transmitter and receiver of the link. Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless systems have been extensively studied during the past two decades, and their potential gains in throughput, diversity, and range have been well quantified. MIMO approaches are now an integral part of the WiFi and 4G standards in use today. It is not surprising that MIMO architectures are useful in improving wireless security as well, since they can provide focused transmit selectivity of both information and noise toward desired and undesired receivers. In this chapter, we discuss a number of different ways that physical layer security can be achieved in wireless networks with MIMO links. We will focus primarily on signal processing related issues (e.g., beamforming, power control, resource allocation) that enable reliable reception at intended recipients and minimize data leakage to eavesdroppers, and we will consider a variety of different MIMO settings including point-to-point, broadcast, interference, and multi-hop networks. We cannot offer an exhaustive survey of such methods in just a single chapter; instead, we present a few representative approaches that illustrate ✐ ✐ — — ✐ ✐ ✐ ✐ ✐ ✐ Physical Layer Security in Wireless the gains that multiple antennas provide. Additional and more complete treatments of the physical layer security problem can be found in [1-4] as well as other chapters in this book.
Introduction Future communication systems will be decentralized and ad-hoc, hence allowing various types of network mobile terminals to join and leave. This makes the whole system vulnerable and susceptible to attacks. Anyone within communication range can listen to and possibly extract information. While these days we have numerous cryptographic methods to ensure high-level security, there is no system with perfect security on the physical layer. Therefore, the physical layer security is attracting renewed attention. Of special interest is so-called information-theoretic security since it concerns the ability of the physical layer to provide perfect secrecy of the transmitted data. In this chapter, we present different scenarios of a decentralized system that protects the broadcasted data on the physical layer and makes it impossible for the eavesdropper to receive the packets no matter how computationally powerful the eavesdropper is. In approaches where information-theoretic security is applied, the main objective is to maximize the rate of reliable information from the source to the intended destination, while all malicious nodes are kept ignorant of that information. This maximum reliable rate under which a perfectly secret communication is possible is known as the secrecy capacity . This line of work was pioneered by Aaron Wyner, who defined the wiretap channel and established the possibility of secure communication links without relying on private (secret) keys.
With the advent of mobile telephony, complemented by the availability of economic infrastructure devices has provided users the freedom to communicate and perform everyday tasks wirelessly. The access to information anywhere anytime provide users more flexibility to communicate, nonetheless it also makes communication more vulnerable to eavesdropping. Security is now considered as an important issue in the design of modern wireless communication system. In contrast to the conventional systems where security issues are dealt in the upper\nlayers of the protocol stack, in this thesis we focus our attention to construct security schemes by exploiting the attributes of the physical layer. \nIn the first part of the thesis, we consider a two-user multiacces channel where the two encoders, Encoder 1 and Encoder 2, are allowed to communicate with each other over a unidirectional noiseless bit-pipe of finite capacity in the presence of an adversary. In this model, the role of Encoder 2 is restricted to only help Encoder 1 in securing information from adversary. For this model, we\nestablish fundamental performance limits on secure communication and characterizes the secrecy capacity in some extreme cases of cooperation between the encoders. The second part of the thesis considers an elementary\nnetwork, which consists of four nodes – a source, a relay, a legitimate receiver and a passive eavesdropper. In this network, the link between two nodes consists of multiple parallel channels as subchannel. Towards this end, we establish bounds on secure communication. We show that for the case in which the relay does not listens to the source, under certain conditions secrecy capacity is established. In the last part of the thesis, we studied a two-user multi-input multioutput X-channel with local feedback and delayed channel state information\navailable at the transmitter in high signal-to-noise ratio regimes. In this setting each transmitter transmits independent messages to both receivers that need to be kept secret from each other. We characterize the optimal sum secure degrees of freedom region of this model.
The open nature of radio propagation enables ubiquitous wireless communication. This allows for seamless data transmission. However, unauthorized users may pose a threat to the security of the data being transmitted to authorized users. This gives rise to network vulnerabilities such as hacking, eavesdropping, and jamming of the transmitted information. Physical layer security (PLS) has been identified as one of the promising security approaches to safeguard the transmission from eavesdroppers in a wireless network. It is an alternative to the computationally demanding and complex cryptographic algorithms and techniques. PLS has continually received exponential research interest owing to the possibility of exploiting the characteristics of the wireless channel. One of the main characteristics includes the random nature of the transmission channel. The aforesaid nature makes it possible for confidential and authentic signal transmission between the sender and the receiver in the physical layer. We start by introducing the basic theories of PLS, including the wiretap channel, information-theoretic security, and a brief discussion of the cryptography security technique. Furthermore, an overview of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication is provided. The main focus of our review is based on the existing key-less PLS optimization techniques, their limitations, and challenges. The paper also looks into the promising key research areas in addressing these shortfalls. Lastly, a comprehensive overview of some of the recent PLS research in 5G and 6G technologies of wireless communication networks is provided.
Due to the broadcast nature of wireless communications, it is difficult to shield transmitted signals from adversarial users in the coverage area of the transmission. This chapter highlights many issues concerned with achieving secrecy in the physical layer. It discusses overview of the foundations dating back to the pioneering key-based Shannon and keyless Wyner–Ziv works on information-theoretic security. In 1978, Leung-Yang-Cheong and Hellman considered the Gaussian wiretap channel. The chapter introduces multiformity of cooperative jamming techniques to show the effectiveness of jamming signals transmitted by some legitimate transmitters in a network of multiple transmitters and receivers in achieving physical layer security for a certain legitimate pair. It gives the idea of employing cooperative jammers in a multiple trusted/untrusted relay networks in order to improve security, and the interactions arising between cooperation and secrecy in the presence of untrusted relays are adopted. A resurgence of interest in aspects of secrecy at the physical layer has been experienced.