Enhanced confidentiality is a major concern for most communication fields including personal, military, and governmental applications. Conventionally, confidentiality is guaranteed by encryption and corresponding decryption so that the encrypted data can only be decrypted by intended receivers. However, both encryption and decryption processes include high complexity and heavy signaling overhead due to key distribution and agreement protocol. Thus, in order to overcome high complexity and heavy signaling, the Physical Layer Security (PLS) has been proposed as a prospective solution to enhance confidentiality against eavesdroppers by physical layer techniques. This paper proposes a novel physical layer security technique that adopts the Adaptive and Rotated Transmission (ART) scheme based on the instantaneous channel information, i.e., magnitude and channel phase in order to achieve secure transmission. The performance of our proposed transmission scheme is evaluated through mathematical analysis and numerical results, showing a meaningful improvement in confidentiality.
Enhanced confidentiality is a major concern for most communication fields including personal, military, and governmental applications. Conventionally, confidentiality is guaranteed by encryption and corresponding decryption so that the encrypted data can only be decrypted by intended receivers. However, both encryption and decryption processes include high complexity and heavy signaling overhead due to key distribution and agreement protocol. Thus, in order to overcome high complexity and heavy signaling, the Physical Layer Security (PLS) has been proposed as a prospective solution to enhance confidentiality against eavesdroppers by physical layer techniques. This paper proposes a novel physical layer security technique that adopts the Adaptive and Rotated Transmission (ART) scheme based on the instantaneous channel information, i.e., magnitude and channel phase in order to achieve secure transmission. The performance of our proposed transmission scheme is evaluated through mathematical analysis and numerical results, showing a meaningful improvement in confidentiality.
Improving confidentiality is a main concern in most wireless transmission systems. Traditionally, confidentiality is guaranteed by means of encryption, where transmitted data are encrypted prior to transmission and only the intended receiver(s) can decrypt them. However, encryption/decryption process involves high complexity and heavy signaling in the key distribution/agreement protocols. Thus, aiming toward overcoming complexity, physical-layer security has been proposed as a promising candidate to improve confidentiality against eavesdroppers by exploiting physical-layer techniques. In this paper, we propose a physical-layer security scheme that adapts the modulation type based on the channel phase in order to secure the transmitted data. Moreover, the phase of the transmitted signal is adjusted in order to improve the immunity against eavesdroppers. The proposed scheme has been designed to achieve high robustness against channel estimation errors. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated through analysis and simulations in order to demonstrate the significant improvement in the confidentiality.
Establishing secured communication among the intended users of wireless networks is a major concern. Especially, providing confidentiality is a critical requirement in a wireless communication system which is more susceptible to eavesdroppers. Prevailing cryptographic methods were proven to meet the security needs to some extent. Sophisticated encryption techniques cannot be always deployed in wireless devices, where the resources are limited. However, physical layer security is recently emerging into a promising paradigm to aid security in wireless networks by exploiting the dynamics of wireless channel. In this study, a physical layer security technique was proposed to enhance confidentiality which selects the modulation type adaptively, based on both channel signal‐to‐noise ratio and phase between transmitter and receiver. The performance of the proposed technique is evaluated for two types of eavesdroppers such as random and intelligent attackers through simulations. The proposed method improves confidentiality and throughput while maintaining the targeted symbol error rate than the existing algorithms.
Physical layer security (PLS) has emerged as a new concept and powerful alternative that can complement and may even replace encryption-based approaches, which entail many hurdles and practical problems for future wireless systems. The basic idea of PLS is to exploit the characteristics of the wireless channel and its impairments including noise, fading, interference, dispersion, diversity, etc. in order to ensure the ability of the intended user to successfully perform data decoding while preventing eavesdroppers from doing so. Thus, the main design goal of PLS is to increase the performance difference between the link of the legitimate receiver and that of the eavesdropper by using well-designed transmission schemes. In this survey, we propose a conceptual, generic, and expandable framework for classifying the existing PLS techniques against wireless passive eavesdropping. In this flexible framework, the security techniques that we comprehensively review in this treatise are divided into two primary approaches: signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio-based approach and complexity-based approach. The first approach is classified into three major categories: first, secrecy channel codes-based schemes; second, security techniques based on channel adaptation; third, schemes based on injecting interfering artificial (noise/jamming) signals along with the transmitted information signals. The second approach (complexity-based), which is associated with the mechanisms of extracting secret sequences from the shared channel, is classified into two main categories based on which layer the secret sequence obtained by channel quantization is applied on. The techniques belonging to each one of these categories are divided and classified into three main signal domains: time, frequency and space. For each one of these domains, several examples are given and illustrated along with the review of the state-of-the-art security advances in each domain. Moreover, the advantages and disadvantages of each approach alongside the lessons learned from existing research works are stated and discussed. The recent applications of PLS techniques to different emerging communication systems such as visible light communication, body area network, power line communication, Internet of Things, smart grid, mm-Wave, cognitive radio, vehicular ad-hoc network, unmanned aerial vehicle, ultra-wideband, device-to-device, radio-frequency identification, index modulation, and 5G non-orthogonal multiple access based-systems, are also reviewed and discussed. The paper is concluded with recommendations and future research directions for designing robust, efficient and strong security methods for current and future wireless systems.
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.
Physical layer security (PLS) has grown in popularity as it guarantees secure and reliable communication between wireless devices without restricting the ability of data analysts to eavesdrop. PLS benefits from the randomization property of the wireless channel, which improves immunity and protects against many dangers of information breaches from eavesdroppers. MIMO and Massive MIMO, which use numerous antennas at the transmitter and receiver ends, are fundamental technologies for improving efficiency in 5G and future network systems. The PLS still requires a significant amount of work before it can be employed in practical systems. The interception of eavesdroppers can be made difficult by adding artificial noise. This paper focuses on the physical layer security considering maximal ratio combining, and artificial noise with beamforming techniques to further enhance the secrecy rate. The proposed work demonstrates that the use of transmitter beamforming with artificial noise can significantly improve the degree of confidentiality of information being transmitted between a transmitter and an intended receiver while making it more difficult for eavesdroppers to intercept. The simulation results in terms of bit error rate show that the proposed method has a significant impact on the error rate performance of the eavesdropper.
Physical layer security (PLS) is a new paradigm aiming at securing communications between legitimate parties at the physical layer. Conventionally, achieving confidentiality in communication networks relies on cryptographic techniques such as public-key cryptography, secret-key distribution and symmetric encryption. Such techniques are deemed secure based on the assumption of limited computational abilities of a wiretapper. Given the relentless progress in computational capacities and the dynamic topology and proliferation of modern wireless networks, the relevance of the previous techniques in securing communications is more and more questionable and less and less reliable. In contrast to this paradigm, PLS does not assume a specific computational power at any eavesdropper, its premise to guarantee provable security via employing channel coding techniques at the physical layer exploiting the inherent randomness in most communication systems. In this dissertation, we investigate a particular aspect of PLS, which is secret-key agreement, also known as secret-sharing. In this setup, two legitimate parties try to distill a secret-key via the observation of correlated signals through a noisy wireless channel, in the presence of an eavesdropper who must be kept ignorant of the secret-key. Additionally, a noiseless public channel is made available to the legitimate parties to exchange public messages that are also accessible to the eavesdropper. Recall that key agreement is an important aspect toward realizing secure communications in the sense that the key can be used in a one-time pad scheme to send the confidential message. In the first part, our focus is on secret-sharing over Rayleigh fading quasi-static channels. We study the fundamental relationship relating the probability of error and a given target secret-key rate in the high power regime. This is characterized through the diversity multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) concept, that we define for our model and then characterize it. We show that the impact of the secrecy constraint is to reduce the effective number of transmit antennas by the number of antennas at the eavesdropper. Toward this characterization, we provide several schemes achieving the DMT and we highlight disparities between coding for the wiretap channel and coding for secret-key agreement. In the second part of the present work, we consider a fast-fading setting in which the wireless channels change during each channel use. We consider a correlated environment where transmit, legitimate receiver and eavesdropper antennas are correlated. We characterize the optimal strategy achieving the highest secret-key rate. We also identify the impact of correlation matrices and illustrate our analysis with various numerical results. Finally, we study the system from an energy-efficiency point of view and evaluate relevant metrics as the minimum energy required for sharing a secret-key bit and the wideband slope.