Principles of Physical Layer Security in Multiuser Wireless Networks: A Survey

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the domain of physical layer security in multiuser wireless networks. The essential premise of physical-layer security is to enable the exchange of confidential messages over a wireless medium in the presence of unauthorized eavesdroppers without relying on higher-layer encryption. This can be achieved primarily in two ways: without the need for a secret key by intelligently designing transmit coding strategies, or by exploiting the wireless communication medium to develop secret keys over public channels. The survey begins with an overview of the foundations dating back to the pioneering work of Shannon and Wyner on information-theoretic security. We then describe the evolution of secure transmission strategies from point-to-point channels to multiple-antenna systems, followed by generalizations to multiuser broadcast, multiple-access, interference, and relay networks. Secret-key generation and establishment protocols based on physical layer mechanisms are subsequently covered. Approaches for secrecy based on channel coding design are then examined, along with a description of inter-disciplinary approaches based on game theory and stochastic geometry. The associated problem of physical-layer message authentication is also introduced briefly. The survey concludes with observations on potential research directions in this area.Comment: 23 pages, 10 figures, 303 refs. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1303.1609 by other authors. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 201

Coding for Cryptographic Security Enhancement using Stopping Sets

In this paper we discuss the ability of channel codes to enhance cryptographic secrecy. Toward that end, we present the secrecy metric of degrees of freedom in an attacker's knowledge of the cryptogram, which is similar to equivocation. Using this notion of secrecy, we show how a specific practical channel coding system can be used to hide information about the ciphertext, thus increasing the difficulty of cryptographic attacks. The system setup is the wiretap channel model where transmitted data traverse through independent packet erasure channels with public feedback for authenticated ARQ (Automatic Repeat reQuest). The code design relies on puncturing nonsystematic low-density parity-check codes with the intent of inflicting an eavesdropper with stopping sets in the decoder. Furthermore, the design amplifies errors when stopping sets occur such that a receiver must guess all the channel-erased bits correctly to avoid an expected error rate of one half in the ciphertext. We extend previous results on the coding scheme by giving design criteria that reduces the effectiveness of a maximum-likelihood attack to that of a message-passing attack. We further extend security analysis to models with multiple receivers and collaborative attackers. Cryptographic security is enhanced in all these cases by exploiting properties of the physical-layer. The enhancement is accurately presented as a function of the degrees of freedom in the eavesdropper's knowledge of the ciphertext, and is even shown to be present when eavesdroppers have better channel quality than legitimate receivers.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figure

Physical layer security in wireless networks: intelligent jamming and eavesdropping

This work aims at addressing two critical security issues residing in the physical layer of wireless networks, namely intelligent jamming and eavesdropping. In the first two chapters we study the problem of jamming in a fixed-rate transmission system with fading, under the general assumption that the jammer has no knowledge about either the codebook used by the legitimate communication terminals, or the source’s output. Both transmitter and jammer are subject to power constraints which can be enforced over each codeword (peak) or over all codewords (average). All our jamming problems are formulated as zero-sum games, having the probability of outage as pay-off function and power control functions as strategies. We provide a comprehensive coverage of these problems, under fast and slow fading, peak and average power constraints, pure and mixed strategies, with and without channel state information (CSI) feedback. Contributions to the eavesdropping problem include a novel feedback scheme for transmitting secret messages between two legitimate parties, over an eavesdropped communication link, presented in Chapter 4. Relative to Wyner’s traditional encoding scheme, our feedback-based encoding often yields larger rate-equivocation regions and achievable secrecy rates. More importantly, by exploiting the channel randomness inherent in the feedback channels, our scheme achieves a strictly positive secrecy rate even when the eavesdropper’s channel is less noisy than the legitimate receiver’s channel. In Chapter 5 we study the problem of active eavesdropping in fast fading channels. The active eavesdropper is a more powerful adversary than the classical eavesdropper. It can choose between two functional modes: eavesdropping the transmission between the legitimate parties (Ex mode), and jamming it (Jx mode) – the active eavesdropper cannot function in full duplex mode. We consider two scenarios: the best-case scenario, when the transmitter knows the eavesdropper’s strategy in advance – and hence can adaptively choose an encoding strategy – and the worst-case scenario, when the active eavesdropper can choose its strategy based on the legitimate transmitter-receiver pair’s strategy. For the second scenario, we introduce a novel encoding scheme, based on very limited and unprotected feedback – the Block-Markov Wyner (BMW) encoding scheme – which outperforms any schemes currently available

Secure Wireless Communications Based on Compressive Sensing: A Survey

IEEE Compressive sensing (CS) has become a popular signal processing technique and has extensive applications in numerous fields such as wireless communications, image processing, magnetic resonance imaging, remote sensing imaging, and anology to information conversion, since it can realize simultaneous sampling and compression. In the information security field, secure CS has received much attention due to the fact that CS can be regarded as a cryptosystem to attain simultaneous sampling, compression and encryption when maintaining the secret measurement matrix. Considering that there are increasing works focusing on secure wireless communications based on CS in recent years, we produce a detailed review for the state-of-the-art in this paper. To be specific, the survey proceeds with two phases. The first phase reviews the security aspects of CS according to different types of random measurement matrices such as Gaussian matrix, circulant matrix, and other special random matrices, which establishes theoretical foundations for applications in secure wireless communications. The second phase reviews the applications of secure CS depending on communication scenarios such as wireless wiretap channel, wireless sensor network, internet of things, crowdsensing, smart grid, and wireless body area networks. Finally, some concluding remarks are given

Distributed secrecy for information theoretic sensor network models

This dissertation presents a novel problem inspired by the characteristics of sensor networks. The basic setup through-out the dissertation is that a set of sensor nodes encipher their data without collaboration and without any prior shared secret materials. The challenge is dealt by an eavesdropper who intercepts a subset of the enciphered data and wishes to gain knowledge of the uncoded data. This problem is challenging and novel given that the eavesdropper is assumed to know everything, including secret cryptographic keys used by both the encoders and decoders. We study the above problem using information theoretic models as a necessary first step towards an understanding of the characteristics of this system problem. This dissertation contains four parts. The first part deals with noiseless channels, and the goal is for sensor nodes to both source code and encipher their data. We derive inner and outer regions of the capacity region (i.e the set of all source coding and equivocation rates) for this problem under general distortion constraints. The main conclusion in this part is that unconditional secrecy is unachievable unless the distortion is maximal, rendering the data useless. In the second part we thus provide a practical coding scheme based on distributed source coding using syndromes (DISCUS) that provides secrecy beyond the equivocation measure, i.e. secrecy on each symbol in the message. The third part deals with discrete memoryless channels, and the goal is for sensor nodes to both channel code and encipher their data. We derive inner and outer regions to the secrecy capacity region, i.e. the set of all channel coding rates that achieve (weak) unconditional secrecy. The main conclusion in this part is that interference allows (weak) unconditional secrecy to be achieved in contrast with the first part of this dissertation. The fourth part deals with wireless channels with fading and additive Gaussian noise. We derive a general outer region and an inner region based on an equal SNR assumption, and show that the two are partially tight when the maximum available user powers are admissible