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

Cooperative Secure Transmission by Exploiting Social Ties in Random Networks

Social awareness and social ties are becoming increasingly popular with emerging mobile and handheld devices. Social trust degree describing the strength of the social ties has drawn lots of research interests in many fields in wireless communications, such as resource sharing, cooperative communication and so on. In this paper, we propose a hybrid cooperative beamforming and jamming scheme to secure communication based on the social trust degree under a stochastic geometry framework. The friendly nodes are categorized into relays and jammers according to their locations and social trust degrees with the source node. We aim to analyze the involved connection outage probability (COP) and secrecy outage probability (SOP) of the performance in the networks. To achieve this target, we propose a double Gamma ratio (DGR) approach through Gamma approximation. Based on this, the COP and SOP are tractably obtained in closed-form. We further consider the SOP in the presence of Poisson Point Process (PPP) distributed eavesdroppers and derive an upper bound. The simulation results verify our theoretical findings, and validate that the social trust degree has dramatic influences on the security performance in the networks.Comment: 30 pages, 11 figures, to be published in IEEE Transactions on Communication

Secure Beamforming for MIMO Two-Way Communications with an Untrusted Relay

This paper studies the secure beamforming design in a multiple-antenna three-node system where two source nodes exchange messages with the help of an untrusted relay node. The relay acts as both an essential signal forwarder and a potential eavesdropper. Both two-phase and three-phase two-way relay strategies are considered. Our goal is to jointly optimize the source and relay beamformers for maximizing the secrecy sum rate of the two-way communications. We first derive the optimal relay beamformer structures. Then, iterative algorithms are proposed to find source and relay beamformers jointly based on alternating optimization. Furthermore, we conduct asymptotic analysis on the maximum secrecy sum-rate. Our analysis shows that when all transmit powers approach infinity, the two-phase two-way relay scheme achieves the maximum secrecy sum rate if the source beamformers are designed such that the received signals at the relay align in the same direction. This reveals an important advantage of signal alignment technique in against eavesdropping. It is also shown that if the source powers approach zero the three-phase scheme performs the best while the two-phase scheme is even worse than direct transmission. Simulation results have verified the efficiency of the secure beamforming algorithms as well as the analytical findings.Comment: 10 figures, Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin