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

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

Secured green communication scheme for interference alignment based networks

In this paper, a new security and green communication scheme is proposed to the Interference-Alignment (IA) based networks. To achieve a secured communication, full-duplex receivers are utilized to transmit artificial noise (AN). Both the signals and the ANs are used to harvest energy to realize green communication. For these reasons, the feasible conditions of this scheme are analyzed first. Secondly, the average transmission rate, the secrecy performance and the harvested energy are investigated. Thirdly, an optimization scheme of simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) is given to optimize the information transmission and the energy harvesting efficiency. Meanwhile, an improved IA iteration algorithm is designed to eliminate both the AN and the interference. Furthermore, relay cooperation is considered and its system performance is analyzed. The simulations show that the target average transmission rate is not affected by AN, while the secrecy performance can be greatly improved. The energy harvesting efficiency is also better than the traditional schemes. As expected, the average transmission rate further is improved with the relay cooperation

An Overview of Physical Layer Security with Finite-Alphabet Signaling

Providing secure communications over the physical layer with the objective of achieving perfect secrecy without requiring a secret key has been receiving growing attention within the past decade. The vast majority of the existing studies in the area of physical layer security focus exclusively on the scenarios where the channel inputs are Gaussian distributed. However, in practice, the signals employed for transmission are drawn from discrete signal constellations such as phase shift keying and quadrature amplitude modulation. Hence, understanding the impact of the finite-alphabet input constraints and designing secure transmission schemes under this assumption is a mandatory step towards a practical implementation of physical layer security. With this motivation, this article reviews recent developments on physical layer security with finite-alphabet inputs. We explore transmit signal design algorithms for single-antenna as well as multi-antenna wiretap channels under different assumptions on the channel state information at the transmitter. Moreover, we present a review of the recent results on secure transmission with discrete signaling for various scenarios including multi-carrier transmission systems, broadcast channels with confidential messages, cognitive multiple access and relay networks. Throughout the article, we stress the important behavioral differences of discrete versus Gaussian inputs in the context of the physical layer security. We also present an overview of practical code construction over Gaussian and fading wiretap channels, and we discuss some open problems and directions for future research.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials (1st Revision

An Anti-Eavesdropping Strategy for Precoding-Aided Spatial Modulation With Rough CSI of Eve

In this paper, an anti-eavesdropping strategy is proposed for secure precoding-aided spatial modulation networks, under the assumption that the rough channel state information of eavesdropper can be obtained at the transmitter. Traditionally, artificial noise (AN) can be always projected into the null-space of the legitimate channel, however it may lead to some security loss since this strategy dispenses with a holistic consideration for secure transmissions. To reduce the computational complexity of our optimization problem, we derive a closed-form expression that is a loose bound of the approximate rate over the illegitimate channel. Then a concave maximization problem is formulated for optimizing the covariance matrix of AN. Simulation results show that our proposed low-complexity scheme performs closely to the method which directly maximizes the approximate secrecy rate expression, and harvests significant secrecy rate gains compared with the traditional null-space projection benchmark