A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances and Future Trends

This paper examines the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity, confidentiality, integrity and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state-of-the-art in physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer. We also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their counter-measures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive jammer, adaptive jammer and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.Comment: 36 pages. Accepted to Appear in Proceedings of the IEEE, 201

A Survey of Physical Layer Security Techniques for 5G Wireless Networks and Challenges Ahead

Physical layer security which safeguards data confidentiality based on the information-theoretic approaches has received significant research interest recently. The key idea behind physical layer security is to utilize the intrinsic randomness of the transmission channel to guarantee the security in physical layer. The evolution towards 5G wireless communications poses new challenges for physical layer security research. This paper provides a latest survey of the physical layer security research on various promising 5G technologies, including physical layer security coding, massive multiple-input multiple-output, millimeter wave communications, heterogeneous networks, non-orthogonal multiple access, full duplex technology, etc. Technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends of physical layer security in 5G and beyond are discussed.Comment: To appear in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication

Beamforming Techniques for Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access in 5G Cellular Networks

In this paper, we develop various beamforming techniques for downlink transmission for multiple-input single-output (MISO) non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems. First, a beamforming approach with perfect channel state information (CSI) is investigated to provide the required quality of service (QoS) for all users. Taylor series approximation and semidefinite relaxation (SDR) techniques are employed to reformulate the original non-convex power minimization problem to a tractable one. Further, a fairness-based beamforming approach is proposed through a max-min formulation to maintain fairness between users. Next, we consider a robust scheme by incorporating channel uncertainties, where the transmit power is minimized while satisfying the outage probability requirement at each user. Through exploiting the SDR approach, the original non-convex problem is reformulated in a linear matrix inequality (LMI) form to obtain the optimal solution. Numerical results demonstrate that the robust scheme can achieve better performance compared to the non-robust scheme in terms of the rate satisfaction ratio. Further, simulation results confirm that NOMA consumes a little over half transmit power needed by OMA for the same data rate requirements. Hence, NOMA has the potential to significantly improve the system performance in terms of transmit power consumption in future 5G networks and beyond.Comment: accepted to publish in IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technolog

Security versus Reliability Analysis of Opportunistic Relaying

Physical-layer security is emerging as a promising paradigm of securing wireless communications against eavesdropping between legitimate users, when the main link spanning from source to destination has better propagation conditions than the wiretap link from source to eavesdropper. In this paper, we identify and analyze the tradeoffs between the security and reliability of wireless communications in the presence of eavesdropping attacks. Typically, the reliability of the main link can be improved by increasing the source's transmit power (or decreasing its date rate) to reduce the outage probability, which unfortunately increases the risk that an eavesdropper succeeds in intercepting the source message through the wiretap link, since the outage probability of the wiretap link also decreases when a higher transmit power (or lower date rate) is used. We characterize the security-reliability tradeoffs (SRT) of conventional direct transmission from source to destination in the presence of an eavesdropper, where the security and reliability are quantified in terms of the intercept probability by an eavesdropper and the outage probability experienced at the destination, respectively. In order to improve the SRT, we then propose opportunistic relay selection (ORS) and quantify the attainable SRT improvement upon increasing the number of relays. It is shown that given the maximum tolerable intercept probability, the outage probability of our ORS scheme approaches zero for $N \to \infty$, where $N$ is the number of relays. Conversely, given the maximum tolerable outage probability, the intercept probability of our ORS scheme tends to zero for $N \to \infty$.Comment: 9 pages. IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 201