Physical layer security (PLS) enables secure communication which is independent of cryptography. It generally requires the legitimate channel being advantageous, otherwise, relaying techniques can be adopted to enhance the legitimate transmission and/or suppress the wiretap one. However, untrusted relays become new threatens since unknown passive eavesdroppers may approach either the transmitter or the receiver to wiretap the secure messages. Regarding the threatens in this setup, we propose a nonlinear transmit and relaying approach to protect the secure messages during the overall transmission. The essential idea is that Alice transmits a nonlinear transform of the original secure signal and the relays collaboratively invert the nonlinear transform at Alice when forwarding it to Bob. By carefully designing the layout of the relays, only a confined region where Bob locates is accessible to the non-distortion version of the original secure signal, and there is no secure signal leakage nearby Alice or the relays. Specifically, the proposed scheme consists of two phases. In the first one, a well-chosen nonlinear transform is applied to the secure signal of Alice, and she then broadcasts the transformed signal to both the relays and the eavesdropper. Each relay determines its forwarding approach by using either the Taylor series or the Lagrange inversion theorem on the nonlinear function of Alice to facilitate the perfect recovery of the original secure signal for Bob. In the second phase, the relays process the received signals using the well-designed forwarding approach and then cooperatively send them to Bob. The forwarding signals are aggregated at Bob and the original secure signal can be recovered directly without any further complicated equalization. We therefore define the region with this property by the secure-information-accessible region, and then provide the secrecy suggestions of laying the relays to shrink it. In contrast, the eavesdropper cannot get any useful secure information from either the first phase or the second one if it locates out of this region. Finally, we analyze both the bit error rate and the secrecy rate, and compare them with the existing secrecy methods. Numerical results validate the proposed nonlinear secrecy approach.
Physical layer security (PLS) enables secure communication which is independent of cryptography. It generally requires the legitimate channel being advantageous, otherwise, relaying techniques can be adopted to enhance the legitimate transmission and/or suppress the wiretap one. However, untrusted relays become new threatens since unknown passive eavesdroppers may approach either the transmitter or the receiver to wiretap the secure messages. Regarding the threatens in this setup, we propose a nonlinear transmit and relaying approach to protect the secure messages during the overall transmission. The essential idea is that Alice transmits a nonlinear transform of the original secure signal and the relays collaboratively invert the nonlinear transform at Alice when forwarding it to Bob. By carefully designing the layout of the relays, only a confined region where Bob locates is accessible to the non-distortion version of the original secure signal, and there is no secure signal leakage nearby Alice or the relays. Specifically, the proposed scheme consists of two phases. In the first one, a well-chosen nonlinear transform is applied to the secure signal of Alice, and she then broadcasts the transformed signal to both the relays and the eavesdropper. Each relay determines its forwarding approach by using either the Taylor series or the Lagrange inversion theorem on the nonlinear function of Alice to facilitate the perfect recovery of the original secure signal for Bob. In the second phase, the relays process the received signals using the well-designed forwarding approach and then cooperatively send them to Bob. The forwarding signals are aggregated at Bob and the original secure signal can be recovered directly without any further complicated equalization. We therefore define the region with this property by the secure-information-accessible region, and then provide the secrecy suggestions of laying the relays to shrink it. In contrast, the eavesdropper cannot get any useful secure information from either the first phase or the second one if it locates out of this region. Finally, we analyze both the bit error rate and the secrecy rate, and compare them with the existing secrecy methods. Numerical results validate the proposed nonlinear secrecy approach.
Cooperative relaying is often deployed to enhance the communication reliability (i.e., diversity order) and consequently the end-to-end achievable rate. However, this raises several security concerns when the relays are untrusted, since they may have access to the relayed message. In this paper, we study the achievable secrecy diversity order of cooperative networks with untrusted relays. In particular, we consider a network with an N-antenna transmitter (Alice), K single-antenna relays, and a single-antenna destination (Bob). We consider the general scenario, where there is no relation between N and K, and therefore, K can be larger than N. Alice and Bob are assumed to be far away from each other, and all communication is done through the relays, i.e., there is no direct link. Providing secure communication while enhancing the diversity order has been shown to be very challenging. In fact, it has been shown in the literature that the maximum achievable secrecy diversity order for the adopted system model is one (while using artificial noise jamming). In this paper, we adopt a nonlinear interference alignment scheme that we have proposed recently to transmit the signals from Alice to Bob. We analyze the proposed scheme in terms of the achievable secrecy rate and secrecy diversity order. Assuming Gaussian inputs, we derive an explicit expression for the achievable secrecy rate and show analytically that a secrecy diversity order of up to min(N, K) - 1 can be achieved using the proposed technique. We provide several numerical examples to validate the obtained analytical results and demonstrate the superiority of the proposed technique to its counterparts that exist in the literature.
In physical layer security (PHY-security), the frequently observed high correlation between the main and wiretap channels can cause a significant loss of secrecy. This paper investigates a slow fading scenario, where a transmitter (Alice) sends a confidential message to a legitimate receiver (Bob) while a passive eavesdropper (Eve) attempts to decode the message from its received signal. It is assumed that Alice is equipped with multiple antennas while Bob and Eve each have a single antenna (i.e., a MISOSE system). In a MISOSE system, high correlation results in nearly collinear main and wiretap channel vectors, which help Eve to see and intercept confidential information. Unfortunately, the signal processing techniques at Alice, such as beamforming and artificial noise (AN), are helpless, especially in the extreme case of completely collinear main and wiretap channel vectors. On this background, we first investigate the achievable secrecy outage probability via beamforming and AN at Alice with the optimal power allocation between the information-bearing signal and AN. Then, an ingenious model, in which a cooperative jamming relay (Relay) is introduced, is proposed to effectively mitigate the adverse effects of high correlation. Based on the proposed model, the power allocation between the information-bearing signal at Alice and the AN at Relay is also studied to maximize secrecy. Finally, to validate our proposed schemes, numerical simulations are conducted, and the results show that a significant performance gain with respect to secrecy is achieved.
Physical (PHY) layer security approaches for wireless communications can prevent eavesdropping without upper layer data encryption. However, they are hampered by wireless channel conditions: absent feedback, they are typically feasible only when the source-destination channel is better than the source-eavesdropper channel. Node cooperation is a means to overcome this challenge and improve the performance of secure wireless communications. This paper addresses secure communications of one source-destination pair with the help of multiple cooperating relays in the presence of one or more eavesdroppers. Three cooperative schemes are considered: decode-and-forward (DF), amplify-and-forward (AF), and cooperative jamming (CJ). For these schemes, the relays transmit a weighted version of a reencoded noise-free message signal (for DF), a received noisy source signal (for AF), or a common jamming signal (for CJ). Novel system designs are proposed, consisting of the determination of relay weights and the allocation of transmit power, that maximize the achievable secrecy rate subject to a transmit power constraint, or, minimize the transmit power subject to a secrecy rate constraint. For DF in the presence of one eavesdropper, closed-form optimal solutions are derived for the relay weights. For other problems, since the optimal relay weights are difficult to obtain, several criteria are considered leading to suboptimal but simple solutions, i.e., the complete nulling of the message signals at all eavesdroppers (for DF and AF), or the complete nulling of jamming signal at the destination (for CJ). Based on the designed relay weights, for DF in the presence of multiple eavesdroppers, and for CJ in the presence of one eavesdropper, the optimal power allocation is obtained in closed-form; in all other cases the optimal power allocation is obtained via iterative algorithms. Numerical evaluation of the obtained secrecy rate and transmit power results show that the proposed design can significantly improve the performance of secure wireless communications.
In this work, physical layer secure transmission of a cooperative wireless communication system over a three-phase amplify-and-forward (AF) two-way relaying channels is studied. A cooperative jamming and multi-antenna relay beamforming scheme that improves physical layer security of the system is proposed. Specifically, it is suggested that in the first and second timeslots when the legitimate users transmit alternatively, a jamming signal can be transmitted by the legitimate party that is not transmitting information-bearing signals This scheme, compared with the approach using a dedicated jammer, achieves a similar jamming effect with reduced complexity. In the third time slot of the protocol, the relay uses two beamforming matrices to process the bidirectional information signals. The jamming signal components at the relay are projected onto the null space of the legitimate relay-destination channels such that they do not affect legitimate communications. Through joint optimization, the sum throughput of the legitimate communication is maximized. In the numerical examples, the proposed scheme is shown to improve the system's secrecy transmission performance.
In the conventional directional modulation (DM) system without relay aiding, when the eavesdropper locates within the main-beam of the desired direction, it can intercept the confidential message from source Alice. In this paper, we propose a strategy to enhance physical-layer security of direction modulation in wireless transmission with the help of multi-relay cooperation. In this scenario, the confidential messages are forwarded to the desired destination receiver, and the artificial noise (AN) is enforced to the eavesdroppers with the aid of multi-relays and direction modulation such that the eavesdropper can not successfully recover the useful information from its received signals. The simulation results show that the proposed method achieves a significantly higher signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) peak at the destination position than at other positions outside the main-beam of the desired position and its secrecy rate performance at undesired position is so poor that the secure transmission is guaranteed.
The Physical Layer Security (PLS) technology has been proved to be an effective way to reduce information leakage in wireless communication networks. This paper discusses the problem of secure transmission for Amplify-and-Forward (AF) cooperative network which contains both an external eavesdropper and some untrusted relays at the same time, where each relay acts as a helper of transmitting information and a potential eavesdropper. We adopt the technology of Cooperative Jamming (CJ), which yields a significant performance in terms of providing a better level of security against eavesdropping and improving the secure transmission performance of the system. First we discuss the security performance of this new system model, give the secrecy rate in theory and derive a tight lower bound of this secrecy rate. Then we propose a relay selection scheme, which avoids using the channel state information (CSI) of external eavesdropper, to transmit information. Afterward, we also discuss the problem of power allocation in order to maximize the secrecy rate.