We investigate signaling and linear precoding designs for secure downlink communications in a multiuser MIMO (MU-MIMO) network. The network is tapped by an external eavesdropper (Eve) who is equipped with a large number of antennas. In addition to the transmission of several (unicast) information signals to downlink users (Bobs), the transmitter (Alice) generates friendly jamming (FJ), aiming to prevent Eve from decoding Alice’s signals. To mitigate both multiuser interference (MUI) and FJ on Bobs, MU-MIMO systems often rely on zero-forcing (ZF) precoders. A condition for the application of such precoders is that the network must beunderloaded, i.e., Alice has more antennas than all Bobs combined. Foroverloadedscenarios, ZF-based precoding cannot guarantee nullification of both MUI and FJ at legitimate receivers. Accordingly, we propose a combined signaling-and-precoding scheme that can also be applied to an overloaded MU-MIMO network. In an underloaded scenario, our technique is shown to impose a more stringent antenna requirement on Eve than a classical ZF-based precoding, i.e., Eve must utilize more antennas if she is to successfully eavesdrop on Alice’s transmissions. Although our scheme is comparable to antenna selection (AS) approaches in terms of Eve’s antenna requirement, it incurs much less delay and complexity by avoiding frequent on/off switching of the RF chains at Bobs. For underloaded scenarios, we provide security analysis that establishes the conditions under which our scheme is superior to the ZF scheme. Using computer simulations, we validate the advantages of our design and contrast it with ZF and AS schemes in terms of the symbol error rate, the EVM, and the achievable rate in both underloaded and overloaded scenarios.
We investigate signaling and linear precoding designs for secure downlink communications in a multiuser MIMO (MU-MIMO) network. The network is tapped by an external eavesdropper (Eve) who is equipped with a large number of antennas. In addition to the transmission of several (unicast) information signals to downlink users (Bobs), the transmitter (Alice) generates friendly jamming (FJ), aiming to prevent Eve from decoding Alice’s signals. To mitigate both multiuser interference (MUI) and FJ on Bobs, MU-MIMO systems often rely on zero-forcing (ZF) precoders. A condition for the application of such precoders is that the network must beunderloaded, i.e., Alice has more antennas than all Bobs combined. Foroverloadedscenarios, ZF-based precoding cannot guarantee nullification of both MUI and FJ at legitimate receivers. Accordingly, we propose a combined signaling-and-precoding scheme that can also be applied to an overloaded MU-MIMO network. In an underloaded scenario, our technique is shown to impose a more stringent antenna requirement on Eve than a classical ZF-based precoding, i.e., Eve must utilize more antennas if she is to successfully eavesdrop on Alice’s transmissions. Although our scheme is comparable to antenna selection (AS) approaches in terms of Eve’s antenna requirement, it incurs much less delay and complexity by avoiding frequent on/off switching of the RF chains at Bobs. For underloaded scenarios, we provide security analysis that establishes the conditions under which our scheme is superior to the ZF scheme. Using computer simulations, we validate the advantages of our design and contrast it with ZF and AS schemes in terms of the symbol error rate, the EVM, and the achievable rate in both underloaded and overloaded scenarios.
We consider the downlink of a multiuser MIMO (MU-MIMO)network in the presence of an external eavesdropper (Eve). No knowledge of Eve's location is assumed at the access point (Alice). The information signals for downlink users (Bobs)are accompanied by bogus signals (a.k.a. friendly jamming)that are generated from Alice. The network is studied in underloaded and overloaded conditions. In an underloaded (overloaded)network, the number of antennas at Alice is larger (smaller)than the total number of Bobs' antennas. In the overloaded setting, traditional methods of creating friendly jamming (FJ), such as zero-forcing-based methods, are infeasible. We propose a linear precoding scheme that relaxes such infeasibility in overloaded MU-MIMO networks. In the worst-case scenario where Eve has knowledge of the channels between Alice and Bobs, we show that our method imposes the most stringent condition on the number of antennas required at Eve to cancel out FJ signals. We verify our analysis with simulations. It turns out that choosing the number of data streams has an important role in achieving a tradeoff between security, reliability, and the achievable rate.
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.
Physical layer security has drawn significant attention in recent years because of its advancement in preventing confidential information leakage to eavesdroppers. In this paper, we focus on secure beamformer designs in multiuser multi-input multi-output (MU-MIMO) systems with a multi-antenna eavesdropper attempting to overhear the confidential information of a particular user. Unlike the existing work, we aim to exploit the inherent multi-user interference to disrupt the reception of the eavesdropper and enhance the security of wireless communications. Particularly, utilizing practical signal-to-interference-noise metrics, the objective of the secure beamformer design is to minimize the eavesdropper's SINR, while providing legitimate users with required prespecified SINRs to guarantee the qualify of service. We propose secure beamformer designs for both downlink and uplink transmissions, under the conditions of known and unknown eavesdropper's channels, respectively. With the proposed secure beamformers, the multiuser signal behaves like the artificial noise or distributed friendly jamming, which can further degrade the reception of the eavesdropper. Extensive simulation studies confirm our analytical performance predictions and illustrate the advantages of proposed beamformer designs for secure MU-MIMO transmissions.
This letter generalizes the precoding-aided spatial modulation (PSM) to a multiuser (MU) downlink scenario. With precoding vectors elaborately designed, a proposed MU-PSM scheme has the capability to resist a multiple antenna eavesdropper. Specifically, signal precoding matrices (SPMs) are designed to cancel the MU interference and modulate partial information bits on the indices of receive antennas. To improve physical layer security, scrambling on SPMs is conceived to construct a fast-varying precoding matrix, which contributes to the degradation at Eve's blind estimation and detection. Moreover, issues of detection algorithms and a lower bound of secrecy rate are addressed to verify security enhancement in the proposed scheme.
Physical layer security has drawn significant attention in recent years because of its advances in preventing confidential information leakage to eavesdroppers. In this paper, we focus on secure beamformer designs in multi-user multi-input multi-output (MU-MIMO) systems with a multi-antenna eavesdropper attempting to overhear the confidential information of a particular user. Unlike existing works, we aim to exploit inherent multi-user interference to disrupt the reception of the eavesdropper and enhance the security of wireless communications. Particularly, utilizing practical signal-to-interference-noise (SINR) metrics, the objective of secure beamformer design is to minimize the eavesdropper's SINR, while providing legitimate users with required pre-specified SINRs to guarantee quality of service (QoS).We propose secure beamformer designs for the downlink transmission situation, under the conditions of known and unknown eavesdropper's channels, respectively. With the proposed secure beamformers, the multi-user signal behaves like artificial noise or distributed friendly jamming, which can further degrade the reception of the eavesdropper. Extensive simulation studies confirm our analytical performance predictions and illustrate the advantages of the proposed beamformer designs for secure MU-MIMO transmissions.
A multiuser secure broadcast system is considered, where there are one multiantenna base station (BS), multiple single-antenna legitimate users, one multiantenna friendly jammer (FJ), and one multiantenna eavesdropper (Eve). We jointly design the optimal precoding matrix at the BS and the jamming covariance matrix at the FJ by minimizing the total transmit power of the BS and FJ under the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio constraints at the users and Eve. To solve this challenging problem, when the FJ has more antennas than the users and Eve, we first find the optimal structure of the jamming covariance matrix and, then, convert the problem into its equivalentconvexform. Also, we propose an iterative algorithm to jointly design the precoding and jamming covariance matrices in all scenarios. The solution obtained by this algorithm is shown to be asymptotically optimal when the FJ has more antennas than the users and Eve. Numerical results show that the proposed schemes considerably outperform the existing schemes.