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IEEE Communications Magazine

Wireless physical layer security: Part 1 [Guest Editorial]

Walid Saad, Xiangyun Zhou, Merouane Abdelkader Debbah, H. Vincent Poor

Published Jun 1, 2015• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The ongoing paradigm shift from classical centralized wireless technologies toward distributed large-scale networks such as the Internet of Things has introduced new security challenges that cannot be fully handled via traditional cryptgraphic means. In such emerging wireless environments, devices have limited capabilities and are not controlled by a central control center; thus, the implementation of computationally expensive cryptographic techniques can be challenging. Motivated by these considerations, substantial recent research has been investigating the use of the physical layer as a means to develop low-complexity and effective wireless security mechanisms. Such techniques are grouped under the umbrella ofphysical layer security. These techniques range from information-theoretic security, which exploits channel advantages to thwart eavesdropping, to physical layer fingerprinting techniques that exploit physical layer features for device identification. In this context, providing state-of-the-art tutorials on the various approaches to physical layer security is of considerable interest. This Feature Topic gathers together such tutorial-style and overview articles that provide an in-depth overview of the broad spectrum of security opportunities brought forward by physical layer security.

DOI
10.1109/mcom.2015.7120010

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The ongoing paradigm shift from classical centralized wireless technologies toward distributed large-scale networks such as the Internet of Things has introduced new security challenges that cannot be fully handled via traditional cryptgraphic means. In such emerging wireless environments, devices have limited capabilities and are not controlled by a central control center; thus, the implementation of computationally expensive cryptographic techniques can be challenging. Motivated by these considerations, substantial recent research has been investigating the use of the physical layer as a means to develop low-complexity and effective wireless security mechanisms. Such techniques are grouped under the umbrella ofphysical layer security. These techniques range from information-theoretic security, which exploits channel advantages to thwart eavesdropping, to physical layer fingerprinting techniques that exploit physical layer features for device identification. In this context, providing state-of-the-art tutorials on the various approaches to physical layer security is of considerable interest. This Feature Topic gathers together such tutorial-style and overview articles that provide an in-depth overview of the broad spectrum of security opportunities brought forward by physical layer security.
The ongoing paradigm shift from classical centralized wireless technologies toward distributed large-scale networks such as the Internet of Things has introduced new security challenges that cannot be fully handled via traditional cryptographic means. In emerging wireless environments, devices have limited capabilities and are not controlled by a central control center; thus, the implementation of computationally expensive cryptographic techniques can be challenging. Motivated by this paradigm shift, substantial recent research has been investigating the use of the physical layer as a means to develop low-complexity and effective wireless security mechanisms. Such techniques are grouped under the umbrella of physical layer security. These techniques range from information-theoretic security, which exploits channel advantages to thwart eavesdropping, to physical layer fi ngerprinting techniques that exploit physical layer features for device identifi cation. In this context, providing state-of-the-art tutorials on the various approaches to physical layer security is of considerable interest. This Feature Topic gathers together tutorial-style and survey articles that provide an in-depth overview of the broad spectrum of security opportunities brought forward by physical layer security.
The security of the Internet of Things (IoT) is receiving considerable interest as the low power constraints and complexity features of many IoT devices are limiting the use of conventional cryptographic techniques. This article provides an overview of recent research efforts on alternative approaches for securing IoT wireless communications at the physical layer, specifically the key topics of key generation and physical layer encryption. These schemes can be implemented and are lightweight, and thus offer practical solutions for providing effective IoT wireless security. Future research to make IoT-based physical layer security more robust and pervasive is also covered.
Security in wireless networks has traditionally been considered to be an issue to be addressed separately from the physical radio transmission aspects of wireless systems. However, with the emergence of new networking architectures that are not amenable to traditional methods of secure communication such as data encryption, there has been an increase in interest in the potential of the physical properties of the radio channel itself to provide communications security. Information theory provides a natural framework for the study of this issue, and there has been considerable recent research devoted to using this framework to develop a greater understanding of the fundamental ability of the so-called physical layer to provide security in wireless networks. Moreover, this approach is also suggestive in many cases of coding techniques that can approach fundamental limits in practice and of techniques for other security tasks such as authentication. This paper provides an overview of these developments.
As wireless networking has a wide range of applications, its security is an issue of concern. Encryption is traditionally the main route to secure communications. Nevertheless, this security solution may be difficult to implement in some modern wireless networks, e.g., ad hoc and radio-frequency identification (RFID) networks which require large-scale organization and low computational complexity, respectively. An alternative approach is physical-layer security, which leverages the physical properties of radio channels to achieve reliable data transmission without the need of secret keys. Since this kind of security emerged from the information theoretical characterization of secrecy, there has been great interest in secrecy capacity of various wireless channels. This paper provides an overview of such capacity for a single user.
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.
The issues of privacy and security in wireless communication networks have taken on an increasingly important role as these networks continue to flourish worldwide. Traditionally, security is viewed as an independent feature addressed above the physical-layer and all widely used cryptographic protocols are designed and implemented assuming the physical-layer has already been established and provides an error free link. However, with the emergence of ad-hoc and decentralized networks, higher-layer techniques, such as encryption, are complex and hard to be implemented. Therefore, there has been a recent attention on studying the fundamental ability of the physical-layer to provide secure wireless communications. In this contribution, we discuss the challenges ahead in implementing wireless physical-layer security.