Quantifying Equivocation for Finite Blocklength Wiretap Codes

This paper presents a new technique for providing the analysis and comparison of wiretap codes in the small blocklength regime over the binary erasure wiretap channel. A major result is the development of Monte Carlo strategies for quantifying a code's equivocation, which mirrors techniques used to analyze normal error correcting codes. For this paper, we limit our analysis to coset-based wiretap codes, and make several comparisons of different code families at small and medium blocklengths. Our results indicate that there are security advantages to using specific codes when using small to medium blocklengths.Comment: Submitted to ICC 201

Physical layer security and energy efficiency over different error correcting codes in wireless sensor networks

Despite the rapid growth in the market demanding for wireless sensor networks (WSNs), they are far from being secured or efficient. WSNs are vulnerable to malicious attacks and utilize too much power. At the same time, there is a significant increment of the security threats due to the growth of the several applications that employ wireless sensor networks. Therefore, introducing physical layer security is considered to be a promising solution to mitigate the threats. This paper evaluates popular coding techniques like Reed solomon (RS) techniques and scrambled error correcting codes specifically in terms of security gap. The difference between the signal to nose ratio (SNR) of the eavesdropper and the legitimate receiver nodes is defined as the security gap. We investigate the security gap, energy efficiency, and bit error rate between RS and scrambled t-error correcting codes for wireless sensor networks. Lastly, energy efficiency in RS and Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) is also studied. The results of the simulation emphasize that RS technique achieves similar security gap as scrambled error correcting codes. However, the analysis concludes that the computational complexities of the RS is less compared to the scrambled error correcting codes. We also found that BCH code is more energy-efficient than RS

Floodlight quantum key distribution: Demonstrating a framework for high-rate secure communication

Floodlight quantum key distribution (FL-QKD) is a radically different QKD paradigm that can achieve gigabit-per-second secret-key rates over metropolitan area distances without multiplexing [Q. Zhuang et al., Phys. Rev. A 94, 012322 (2016)]. It is a two-way protocol that transmits many photons per bit duration and employs a high-gain optical amplifier, neither of which can be utilized by existing QKD protocols, to mitigate channel loss. FL-QKD uses an optical bandwidth that is substantially larger than the modulation rate and performs decoding with a unique broadband homodyne receiver. Essential to FL-QKD is Alice's injection of photons from a photon-pair source—in addition to the light used for key generation—into the light she sends to Bob. This injection enables Alice and Bob to quantify Eve's intrusion and thus secure FL-QKD against collective attacks. Our proof-of-concept experiment included 10 dB propagation loss—equivalent to 50 km of low-loss fiber—and achieved a 55 Mbit/s secret-key rate (SKR) for a 100 Mbit/s modulation rate, as compared to the state-of-the-art system's 1 Mbit/s SKR for a 1 Gbit/s modulation rate [M. Lucamarini et al., Opt. Express 21, 24550 (2013)], representing ∼500-fold and ∼50 fold improvements in secret-key efficiency (bits per channel use) and SKR (bits per second), respectively.United States. Office of Naval Research (Grant N00014-13-1-0774)United States. Air Force Office of Scientific Research (Grant FA9550-14-1-0052)United States. Army Research Office (United States. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Quiness Program. Grant W31P4Q-12-1-0019)United States. Office of Naval Research. Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (Grant N00014-14-1-0808