Due to the broadcast nature of wireless communications, users’ data transmitted wirelessly is susceptible to security/privacy threats. Meanwhile, as a result of the limitation of spectrum resources, massive wireless connections will incur serious interference, which may damage the efficiency of data transmission. Therefore, improving both efficiency and secrecy of data transmission is of research significance. In this paper, we propose a wireless transmission scheme by taking both Secure Communication (SC) and Interference Management (IM) into account, namely SCIM. With this scheme, an SCIM signal is generated by the legitimate transmitter (Tx) and sent along with the desired signal, so that the SCIM signal can interact with and suppress the environmental interference at the legitimate receiver (Rx). Meanwhile, the SCIM signal may interfere with the eavesdropper in the coverage of legitimate transmission so as to deteriorate the eavesdropping performance. Therefore, the secrecy of desired transmission is improved. In this way, both the transmission efficiency and privacy are enhanced. Then, by taking various transmission preferences into account, we develop different implementations of SCIM, including Interference Suppression First SCIM (ISF-SCIM), Data Transmission First SCIM (DTF-SCIM), Anti-Eavesdropping First SCIM (AEF-SCIM), and Secrecy Rate Maximization SCIM (SRM-SCIM). Our in-depth simulation results have shown the proposed methods to effectively improve the efficiency and secrecy of the legitimate transmission.
Due to the broadcast nature of wireless communications, users’ data transmitted wirelessly is susceptible to security/privacy threats. Meanwhile, as a result of the limitation of spectrum resources, massive wireless connections will incur serious interference, which may damage the efficiency of data transmission. Therefore, improving both efficiency and secrecy of data transmission is of research significance. In this paper, we propose a wireless transmission scheme by taking both Secure Communication (SC) and Interference Management (IM) into account, namely SCIM. With this scheme, an SCIM signal is generated by the legitimate transmitter (Tx) and sent along with the desired signal, so that the SCIM signal can interact with and suppress the environmental interference at the legitimate receiver (Rx). Meanwhile, the SCIM signal may interfere with the eavesdropper in the coverage of legitimate transmission so as to deteriorate the eavesdropping performance. Therefore, the secrecy of desired transmission is improved. In this way, both the transmission efficiency and privacy are enhanced. Then, by taking various transmission preferences into account, we develop different implementations of SCIM, including Interference Suppression First SCIM (ISF-SCIM), Data Transmission First SCIM (DTF-SCIM), Anti-Eavesdropping First SCIM (AEF-SCIM), and Secrecy Rate Maximization SCIM (SRM-SCIM). Our in-depth simulation results have shown the proposed methods to effectively improve the efficiency and secrecy of the legitimate transmission.
Traditional approaches for providing confidentiality of wirelessly transmitted signals are often based on cryptographic techniques. While these techniques ensure that messages are encrypted and secured against eavesdropping, they are not sufficient to protect important transmission attributes at the physical (PHY) layer. Specifically, several elds in the headers of PHY and medium access control (MAC) frames are typically sent unencrypted to maintain proper protocol functionality (e.g., sender/receiver identification). As a result, they leak side-channel information (SCI), including payload size, frequency and phase oset, modulation and coding scheme, identities of communication nodes, frame type, transmission rate, etc. These SCI can be exploited by an adversary to launch various passive (eavesdropping) and active (jamming) attacks. To complement cryptographic techniques used at upper layers and prevent the leakage of SCI at the PHY/MAC layers, PHY-layer security techniques have been introduced. These techniques exploit the characteristics of the wireless channel along with multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technologies, in which multiple transmitting and receiving antennas are utilized to prevent information leakage to eavesdroppers and/or avoid jamming attacks. In particular, if the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) at an adversary is lower than the one at a legitimate receiver, secure communication can be achieved through the so-called wiretap coding. MIMO systems enable the transmitter and/or the receiver to generate artificial noise, called friendly jamming (FJ), so as to reduce the SINR at the adversary without impacting the SINR at the legitimate receiver. In this dissertation, we focus on exploring the security threats to next-generation wireless systems. We develop MIMO-based PHY-layer security methods to achieve reliable and secret communications in these systems. First, we consider a broadcast channel, in which a multi-antenna transmitter (Alice) sends K confidential information signals to K legitimate receivers (Bobs) in the presence of L eavesdropping devices (Eves). Alice uses MIMO precoding to generate the information signals along with her own Tx-based friendly jamming (TxFJ). Interference at each Bob is removed via a technique called MIMO zero-forcing. This TxFJ, however, leaves an eavesdropping \vulnerability region" in the proximity of each Bob, which can be exploited by a nearby Eve. Specically, because of the high correlation in the channel state information (CSI) at a Bob and nearby Eves, the TxFJ becomes less effective in preventing eavesdropping at these Eves. We address this problem by augmenting TxFJ with receiver-based friendly jamming (RxFJ), generated by each Bob. Specifically, we allow each Bob to use self-interference suppression (SIS) techniques to transmit a friendly jamming signal while simultaneously receiving an information signal over the same channel. These SIS techniques exploit circulators to attenuate the self-interference power of RxFJ at Bobs and utilize analog/digital cancellation methods to clean out any remaining residual self-interference. Considering the resulting broadcast channel, we rst study a two-user scenario and develop a secrecy encoding scheme for constructing the signals intended to two Bobs. We characterize the corresponding achievable secrecy sum-rate and formulate an optimization problem to maximize this metric. We then extend our approach to K-user scenarios and study a power minimization problem. Particularly, in our analysis we minimize the powers allocated to information and friendly jamming signals (both TxFJ and RxFJ) while guaranteeing individual secrecy rates for various Bobs. The problem is solved for the cases when the eavesdropper's CSI (ECSI) is known or unknown (but with a known distribution). Simulations show the effectiveness of the proposed solutions. Furthermore, we discuss how to schedule transmissions when the rate requirements need to be satised on average rather than instantaneously. In low and high power regime, a scheduling algorithm that serves only the strongest receivers is shown to outperform the one that schedules all receivers. Next, we consider a single-cell massive MIMO system in which a base station (BS) with a large number of antennas transmits simultaneously to several single antenna users. The BS acquires the CSI for various receivers using uplink pilot transmissions. We demonstrate the vulnerability of the CSI estimation process to a pilot-contamination (PC) attack that aims at minimizing the sum-rate of downlink transmissions by contaminating uplink pilots. We rst study PC attacks for two downlink power allocation strategies under the assumption that the attacker knows the locations of the BS and its users. Later on, we relax this assumption and consider the case when such knowledge is probabilistic. The formulated problems are solved using stochastic optimization, Lagrangian minimization, and game-theoretic methods. A closed-form solution for a special case of the problem is obtained. Furthermore, we analyze the \achievable individual secrecy rates" under PC attacks, and provide an upper-bound on these rates. We also study this scenario without a priori knowledge of user locations at the attacker by introducing chance constraints. Another attack model is considered, where the attacker generates jamming signals in both the CSI estimation and data transmission phases by exploiting inband full-duplex techniques. Our results indicate that such attacks can degrade the throughput of a massive MIMO system by more than 50%, and reduce fairness among users significantly.
The broadcast nature of wireless communication systems makes wireless transmission extremely susceptible to eavesdropping and even malicious interference. Physical layer security technology can effectively protect the private information sent by the transmitter from being listened to by illegal eavesdroppers, thus ensuring the privacy and security of communication between the transmitter and legitimate users. Thus, the main design goal of physical layer security is to increase the performance difference between the link of the legitimate receiver and that of the eavesdropper using well-designed transmission schemes. The development of mobile communication presents new challenges to physical layer security research. This paper provides a survey of the physical layer security research on various promising mobile technologies from secure key generation and keyless techniques, including secure key generation, directional modulation (DM), spatial modulation (SM), covert communication, and intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided communication. Finally, the future topics and the unresolved technical challenges are presented in physical layer security for mobile communications.
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.
A novel semantic communication (SC)-assisted secrecy transmission framework is proposed. In particular, the legitimate transmitter (Tx) sends the superimposed semantic and bit stream to the legitimate receiver (Rx), where the information may be eavesdropped by the malicious node (EVE). As the EVE merely has the conventional bit-oriented communication structure, the semantic signal acts as the type of beneficial information-bearing artificial noise (AN), which not only keeps strictly confidential to the EVE but also interferes with the EVE. The ergodic (equivalent) secrecy rate over fading wiretap channels is maximized by jointly optimizing the transmit power, semantic-bit power splitting ratio, and the successive interference cancellation decoding order at the Tx, subject to both the instantaneous peak and long-term average power constraints. To address this non-convex problem, both the optimal and suboptimal algorithms are developed by employing the Lagrangian dual method and the successive convex approximation method, respectively. Numerical results show that the proposed SC-assisted secrecy transmission scheme can significantly enhance the physical layer security compared to the baselines using the conventional bit-oriented communication and no-information-bearing AN. It also shows that the proposed suboptimal algorithm can achieve a near-optimal performance.
The Artificial noise (AN) injection scheme is recently proposed to secure wireless transmissions. By simultaneously transmitting data symbols and artificial interference, it prevents the eavesdropper from decoding the secret message intended for the legitimate receiver. In this paper, we mainly focus on weakness of the AN security scheme. First, we analyze the necessary condition for such a scheme to guarantee that the legitimate transmitter-receiver pair can achieve a positive secrecy communication rate. And then, we further propose an effective eavesdropping strategy to counteract such a security scheme once the condition does not hold up in some wireless systems. Our proposed wiretap method involves complex-valued independent component analysis (ICA) and requires the antenna number of the eavesdropper's is larger or equal to that of the transmitter's. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of this wiretap method.
This paper investigates physical layer security (PLS) in wireless interference networks. Specifically, we consider confidential transmission from a legitimate transmitter (Alice) to a legitimate receiver (Bob), in the presence of non-colluding passive eavesdroppers (Eves), as well as multiple legitimate transceivers. To mitigate interference at legitimate receivers and enhance PLS, artificial noise (AN) aided interference alignment (IA) is explored. However, the conventional leakage minimization (LM) based IA may exhibit confidential signal cancellation phenomenon. We theoretically analyze the cause and then establish a condition under which this phenomenon will occur almost surely. Moreover, we propose a means of avoiding this phenomenon by integrating the max-eigenmode beamforming (MEB) into the traditional LM based IA. By assuming that only statistical channel state informations (CSIs) of Eves and local CSIs of legitimate users are available, we derive a closed form expression for the secrecy outage probability (SOP), and establish a condition under which positive secrecy rate is achievable. To enhance security performance, an SOP constrained secrecy rate maximization (SRM) problem is formulated and an efficient numerical method is developed for the optimal solution. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness and the usefulness of the proposed approach.