Message authentication allows the receiver of a message to detect whether the message is forged or illegally modified by someone other than the legitimate sender.Traditional message authentication schemes are typically implemented at the network layer or higher,which are vulnerable to security threats such as replay attacks,denial of service attacks and so forth.Based on the existing schemes based on the physical layer,this paper proposes a message authentication scheme using the Minimum Mean Square Error(MMSE) method for estimation of channels under the Gaussian vector multiple-input channel model.An optimal attack strategy for the eavesdropper is also formulated,and determines the reachable secrecy boundary according to the probabilities of successful attacks of the eavesdropper.By using the information theory to analyze the maximum security authentication rate of the channel,the secrecy capacity domain of the channel is obtained.Experimental results show that the average probability of successful attack of the eavesdropper decreases exponentially with the increased number of received messages.When the spatial correlation coefficients between all senders and the eavesdropper are lower than 0.3,the average probability of successful attack of the eavesdropper is less than 1.87×10-7,which verifies the security of the proposed scheme.
Message authentication allows the receiver of a message to detect whether the message is forged or illegally modified by someone other than the legitimate sender.Traditional message authentication schemes are typically implemented at the network layer or higher,which are vulnerable to security threats such as replay attacks,denial of service attacks and so forth.Based on the existing schemes based on the physical layer,this paper proposes a message authentication scheme using the Minimum Mean Square Error(MMSE) method for estimation of channels under the Gaussian vector multiple-input channel model.An optimal attack strategy for the eavesdropper is also formulated,and determines the reachable secrecy boundary according to the probabilities of successful attacks of the eavesdropper.By using the information theory to analyze the maximum security authentication rate of the channel,the secrecy capacity domain of the channel is obtained.Experimental results show that the average probability of successful attack of the eavesdropper decreases exponentially with the increased number of received messages.When the spatial correlation coefficients between all senders and the eavesdropper are lower than 0.3,the average probability of successful attack of the eavesdropper is less than 1.87×10-7,which verifies the security of the proposed scheme.
This paper considers the problem of proof for the secrecy capacity region of the Gaussian wiretap channel. In this channel, the transmitter sends confidential messages to the legitimate receivers, which need to be kept asymptotically perfectly secret from the eavesdropper. We characterize the secrecy capacity region of this channel and give a converse proof by using the fundamental relationship between information theory and the estimation theory in the Gaussian channel, relating the derivative of the mutual information to the minimum mean-square-error (MMSE). Our proof is different from the superposition coding and the random binning. We obtain that using the relationship between MMSE and mutual information one can provide insightful and simple proofs for multiuser single antenna problems and the secrecy capacity problem, such as broadcast channel.
Inherent openness of the wireless medium imposes stronger challenges on the security of wireless communications. Information-theoretic security addresses these challenges at the physical layer by using tools from wireless communication theory, signal processing and information theory. In information-theoretic security, physical layer communication is intelligently designed to exploit the characteristics of the wireless medium, such as fading, interference, cooperation, and multi-dimensional signaling, in order to provide or improve security. In this dissertation, we study the security of several fundamental wireless network configurations from an information-theoretic perspective. First, we study the Gaussian multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wiretap channel. In this channel, the transmitter sends a common message to both the legitimate user and the eavesdropper. In addition to the common message, a private message is sent only to the legitimate user, which needs to be kept hidden as much as possible from the eavesdropper. We obtain the entire capacity-equivocation region for this channel model. In particular, we show the sufficiency of jointly Gaussian auxiliary random variables and channel input to evaluate the existing single-letter description of the capacity-equivocation region due to Csiszar-Korner. Next, we study the secure broadcasting problem, where a transmitter wants to have secure communication with multiple legitimate users in the presence of an external eavesdropper. We study several special cases of the secure broadcasting problem. First, we consider the degraded multi-receiver wiretap channel, and establish its secrecy capacity region. Second, we consider the parallel less noisy multi-receiver wiretap channel, and obtain its common message secrecy capacity and sum secrecy capacity. Third, we consider the parallel degraded multi-receiver wiretap channel for the two-user and two-sub-channel case, and obtain its entire secrecy capacity region. Finally, we consider a parallel channel model with two sub-channels, where the transmitter can use only one of the subchannels at any time, and characterize its secrecy capacity region. Then, we study the two-user Gaussian MIMO broadcast channel with common and confidential messages. In this channel model, the transmitter sends a common message to both users, and a confidential message to each user which needs to be kept perfectly secret from the other user. We obtain the entire capacity region of this channel. We also explore the connections between this channel model and its non-confidential counterpart, i.e., the Gaussian MIMO broadcast channel with common and private message. Next, we consider the Gaussian MIMO multi-receiver wiretap channel and obtain its secrecy capacity region for the most general case. We first show that even for the single-input single-output (SISO) case, existing converse techniques fall short of proving the secrecy capacity region, to emphasize the need for a new proof technique, which we develop by using the relationships between the Fisher information and the differential entropy. Using this new proof technique, we obtain the secrecy capacity region of the degraded MIMO channel. We then establish the secrecy capacity region of the general MIMO channel by using the channel enhancement technique in conjunction with the capacity result we obtained for the degraded MIMO channel. For the general MIMO channel, we show that dirty-paper coding (DPC) combined with stochastic encoding attains the entire secrecy capacity region. Then, we study the multi-receiver wiretap channel for a more general scenario, where, in addition to confidential messages, the transmitter sends public messages to the legitimate users, on which there are no secrecy constraints. First, we consider the degraded discrete memoryless channel, and obtain inner and outer bounds for the capacity region. These inner and outer bounds match for certain cases, providing the capacity region. Second, we obtain an inner bound for the general discrete memoryless channel by using Marton's inner bound. Third, we consider the degraded Gaussian MIMO channel, and show that jointly Gaussian auxiliary random variables and channel input are sufficient to exhaust the inner and outer bounds. Finally, we provide an inner bound for the capacity region of the general Gaussian MIMO channel. Next, we focus on the multiple access wiretap (MAC-WT) channel whose capacity region is unknown. We consider a special class of MAC-WT channels which we call the weak eavesdropper class, where each user's link to the legitimate receiver is stronger than its link to the eavesdropper. For this class of channels, we develop an outer bound for the secrecy capacity region, which partially matches the achievable region in an n-letter form. We evaluate a looser version of our outer bound for the Gaussian case, and show that our outer bound is within 0.5 bits/channel use of the achievable rates along the individual secrecy rates for all weak eavesdropper Gaussian MAC-WT. Then, we investigate the effects of user cooperation on the secrecy of broadcast channels by considering the cooperative relay broadcast channel (CRBC). We propose an achievable scheme that combines Marton's coding scheme for broadcast channels and Cover and El Gamal's compress-and-forward (CAF) scheme for relay channels. For the Gaussian CRBC, we show that both users can have positive secrecy rates, which is not possible for scalar Gaussian broadcast channels without cooperation. We further investigate the effects of user cooperation on secrecy by considering the multiple access channel with generalized feedback (MAC-GF), which can be viewed as the MAC-dual of the CRBC. We propose a CAF-based achievable secrecy rate region for the MAC-GF. Specializing our results to a Gaussian MAC-GF, we present numerical results which demonstrate that cooperation can improve secrecy for the MAC-GF. Next, we study the two-user one-eavesdropper discrete memoryless compound wiretap channel, and provide the best known lower bound for the secrecy capacity of this compound channel. We evaluate this achievable secrecy rate for the Gaussian MIMO case by using DPC. We show that this achievable secrecy rate achieves at least half of the secrecy capacity of this Gaussian MIMO compound wiretap channel, and also attains the secrecy capacity when the eavesdropper is degraded with respect to one of the two users. Then, we study the degraded compound multi-receiver wiretap channel (DCMRWC), which, in addition to a group of eavesdroppers, has two groups of users, namely the stronger group and the weaker group. We study two different communication scenarios for this channel. In the first scenario, there is only one eavesdropper, and the transmitter sends a confidential message to each group of legitimate users while keeping both messages secret from the eavesdropper. In the second scenario, we study the DCMRWC with layered messages without any restriction on the number of eavesdroppers. For both scenarios, we obtain the secrecy capacity region for the discrete memoryless channel, the parallel channel, and the Gaussian parallel channel. For the Gaussian MIMO channel, we obtain the secrecy capacity region when there is only one user in the second group. Next, we study the two-user fading broadcast channel and obtain its ergodic secrecy capacity region. We show that, thanks to fading, both users can have simultaneous secure communication with the transmitter, although this is not possible in the scalar non-fading Gaussian broadcast channel where only one user can have secure communication. This simultaneous secrecy of both users is achieved by an opportunistic communication scheme, in which, at each time instant, the transmitter communicates with the user having a better channel gain. Then, we study the secure lossy transmission of a vector Gaussian source to a legitimate user in the presence of an eavesdropper, where both the legitimate user and the eavesdropper have vector Gaussian side information. We obtain an outer bound for the rate, equivocation and distortion region. Moreover, we obtain the maximum equivocation at the eavesdropper when there is no constraint on the transmission rate. By using this maximum equivocation result, we show two facts. First, for this problem, in general, Wyner-Ziv scheme is suboptimal, although, it is optimal in the absence of an eavesdropper. And, second, even when there is no transmission rate constraint, an uncoded transmission scheme is suboptimal; the presence of an eavesdropper necessitates the use of a coded scheme to attain the maximum equivocation. Finally, we revisit the secure lossy source coding problem. In all works on this problem, either the equivocation of the source at the eavesdropper or the equivocation of the legitimate user's reconstruction of the source at the eavesdropper is used to measure secrecy. We first propose the relative equivocation of the source at the eavesdropper with respect to the legitimate user as a new secrecy measure. We argue that this new secrecy measure is the one that corresponds to the natural generalization of the equivocation in a wiretap channel to the context of secure lossy source coding. Under this new secrecy measure, we provide a single-letter description of the rate, relative equivocation and distortion region, as well as its specializations to degraded and reversely degraded cases. We investigate the relationships between the optimal scheme that attains this region and the Wyner-Ziv scheme.
We consider the problem of keyless message authentication over noisy channels in the presence of an active adversary. Different from the existing models, in our model, the legitimate users do not have any pre-shared key for authentication. Instead, we use the noisy channel connecting the legitimate users for authentication. The main idea is to utilize the noisy channel connecting the legitimate users to distinguish a legitimate message from a fake message, by generating an output at the receiver that is difficult for the adversary to replicate through its noisy channel. By interpreting the message authentication as a hypothesis testing problem, we investigate the authentication exponent and the authenticated channel capacity of the noisy channel. In the authentication exponent problem, for a given message rate, we investigate the speed at which the optimal successful attack probability can be driven to zero. We fully characterize the authentication exponent for the zero-rate message case and provide both an upper bound and a lower bound on the exponent for the non-zero message rate case. In the authenticated capacity problem, we study the largest data transmission rate under which the attacker's optimal successful attack probability can still be made arbitrarily small. We establish an all or nothing result. In particular, we show that the authenticated channel capacity is the same as the classic channel capacity if a simulatability condition is not satisfied, while the authenticated capacity will be zero if this condition is satisfied. We also provide efficient algorithms to check this condition. We further show that our results are robust to modeling uncertainties about the eavesdropper's channels.
Gaussian wireless channels are studied under two forms of security attacks: (i) the jamming attack, where the adversary is active and transmits corruptive signal, but is not interested in the content of the communication, (ii) the eavesdropping attack, where the adversary is passive and overhears the communication and tries to obtain the message that has been transmitted. The active attack is studied in a multi-user setting. The behavior of two users and one jammer in an additive white Gaussian channel (AWGN) with and without fading is investigated, when they participate in a non-cooperative zero-sum game, with the channel's input/output mutual information as the objective function. We assume that the jammer can eavesdrop the channel and can use the information obtained to perform correlated jamming. We also differentiate between the availability of perfect and noisy information about the user signals at the jammer. Under various assumptions on the channel characteristics, and the extent of channel state information available at the users and the jammer, we show the existence, or otherwise non-existence of a simultaneously optimal set of strategies for the users and the jammer, and characterize those strategies whenever they exist. For the passive eavesdropping attack, we study multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) AWGN channels. We first consider a multiple-input single-output (MISO) channel, where the transmitter has multiple antennas, while the receiver and the eavesdropper have single antennas each. We find achievable rates for this channel. With the channel input restricted to Gaussian signalling with no pre-processing of information, optimal transmission strategies that maximize the achievable secrecy rates are found, in terms of the input covariance matrices. It is shown that, under the optimal communication strategy, the system reduces to a single-input single-output (SISO) channel. We then extend the achievability results to fading Gaussian MISO channels. Finally, as a step toward generalizing the problem to one with multiple antennas at the receiver, we discuss the Gaussian 2-2-1 channel with a transmitter and a receiver with two antennas each, and a single antenna eavesdropper. We develop an achievability scheme similar to those of the SISO and MISO channels, and further show that in fact, it achieves the secrecy capacity of this 2-2-1 channel.
As modern infrastructure systems become increasingly more complex, we are faced with many new challenges in the area of information security. In this thesis we examine some approaches to security based on ideas from information theory. The protocols considered in this thesis, build upon the channel, a model for physical layer security proposed by A. Wyner in 1975. At a higher level, the protocols considered here can strengthen existing mechanisms for security by providing a new location based approach at the physical layer.
In the first part of this thesis, we extend the wiretap channel model to the case when there are multiple receivers, each experiencing a time varying fading channel. Both the scenario when each legitimate receiver wants a common message as well as the scenario when they all want separate messages are studied and capacity results are established in several special cases. When each receiver wants a separate independent message, an opportunistic scheme that transmits to the strongest user at each time, and uses Gaussian codebooks is shown to achieve the sum secrecy capacity in the limit of many users. When each receiver wants a common message, a lower bound to the capacity is provided, independent of the number of receivers.
In the second part of the thesis the role of multiple antennas for secure communication studied. We establish the secrecy capacity of the multi antenna wiretap channel (MIMOME channel), when the channel matrices of the legitimate receiver and eavesdropper are fixed and known to all the terminals. To establish the capacity, a new computable upper bound on the secrecy capacity of the wiretap channel is developed, which may be of independent interest. It is shown that Gaussian codebooks suffice to attain the capacity for this problem. For the case when the legitimate receiver has a single antenna (MISOME channel) a rank one transmission scheme is shown to attain the capacity. In the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, it is shown that a capacity achieving scheme involves simultaneous diagonalization of the channel matrices using the generalized singular value decomposition and independently coding accross the resulting parallel channels. Furthermore a semi-blind masked beamforming scheme is studied, which transmits signal of interest in the subspace of the legitimate receiver's channel and synthetic noise in the orthogonal subspace. It is shown that this scheme is nearly optimal in the high SNR regime for the MISOME case and the performance penalty for the MIMOME channel is evaluated in terms of the generalized singular values. The behavior of the secrecy capacity in the limit of many antennas is also studied. When the channel matrices have i.i.d. C N(0, 1) entries, we show that (1) the secrecy capacity for the MISOME channel converges (almost surely) to zero if and only if the eavesdropper increases its antennas at a rate twice as fast as the sender (2) when a total of T G 1 antennas have to be allocated betweeen the sender and the receiver, the optimal allocation, which maximizes the number of eavesdropping antennas for zero secrecy capacity is 2 : 1.
In the final part of the thesis, we consider a variation of the wiretap channel where the sender and legitimate receiver also have access to correlated source sequences. They use both the sources and the structure of the underlying channel to extract secret keys. We provide general upper and lower bounds on the secret key rate and establish the capacity for the reversely degraded case. (Copies available exclusively from MIT Libraries, Rm. 14-0551, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307. Ph. 617-253-5668; Fax 617-253-1690.)
Secure communication under channel uncertainty is an important and challenging problem in physical-layer security and cryptography. In this dissertation, we take a \nfundamental information-theoretic view at three concrete settings and use them to shed insight into efficient secure communication techniques for different scenarios under channel uncertainty. \n \nFirst, a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) Gaussian broadcast channel with two receivers and two messages: a common message intended for both receivers (i.e., channel \nuncertainty for decoding the common message at the receivers) and a confidential message intended for one of the receivers but needing to be kept asymptotically perfectly secret from the other is considered. A matrix characterization of the secrecy capacity region is established via a channel-enhancement argument and an extremal entropy inequality previously established for characterizing the capacity region of a degraded compound MIMO Gaussian broadcast channel. \n \nSecond, a multilevel security wiretap channel where there is one possible realization for the legitimate receiver channel but multiple possible realizations for the eavesdropper channel (i.e., channel uncertainty at the eavesdropper) is considered. A coding scheme is designed such that the number of secure bits delivered to the legitimate receiver depends on the actual realization of the eavesdropper channel. More specifically, when the eavesdropper channel realization is weak, all bits delivered to the legitimate receiver need to be secure. In addition, when the eavesdropper channel realization is strong, a prescribed part of the bits needs to remain secure. We call such codes security embedding codes, referring to the fact that high-security bits are now embedded into the low-security ones. We show that the key to achieving efficient security embedding is to jointly encode the low-security and high-security bits. In particular, the low-security bits can be used as (part of) the transmitter randomness to protect the high-security ones. \n \nFinally, motivated by the recent interest in building secure, robust and efficient distributed information storage systems, the problem of secure symmetrical multilevel diversity coding (S-SMDC) is considered. This is a setting where there are channel uncertainties at both the legitimate receiver and the eavesdropper. The problem of encoding individual sources is first studied. A precise characterization of the entire admissible rate region is established via a connection to the problem of secure coding over a three-layer wiretap network and utilizing some basic polyhedral structure of the admissible rate region. Building on this result, it is then shown that the simple coding strategy of separately encoding individual sources at the encoders can achieve the minimum sum rate for the general S-SMDC problem.