Multi-Antenna Covert Communication via Full-Duplex Jamming Against a Warden With Uncertain Locations

Covert communication can hide the information transmission process from the warden to prevent adversarial eavesdropping. However, it becomes challenging when the location of warden is uncertain. In this paper, we propose a covert communication scheme against a warden with uncertain locations, which maximizes the connectivity throughput between a multi-antenna transmitter and a full-duplex jamming receiver with the limit of covert outage probability (the probability of the transmission found by the warden). First, we analyze the monotonicity of the covert outage probability to obtain the optimal location for the warden. Then, under this worst situation, we optimize the transmission rate, the transmit power and the jamming power of covert communication to maximize the connection throughput. This problem is solved in two stages. First, we derive the transmit-to-jamming power ratio limit from the maximum allowed covert outage probability. With this constraint, the connection probability is maximized over the transmit-to-jamming power ratio for a fixed transmission rate. Since the connection probability and the transmission rate are coupled, the bisection method is applied to maximize the connectivity throughput via optimizing the transmission rate iteratively. Simulation results are presented to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme

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

Covert communication in relay and RIS networks

Covert communication aims to prevent the warden from detecting the presence of communications, i.e. with a negligible detection probability. When the distance between the transmitter and the legitimate receiver is large, large transmission power is needed, which in turn increases the detection probability. Relay is an effective technique to tackle this problem, and various relaying strategies have been proposed for long-distance covert communication in these years. In this article, we first offer a tutorial on the relaying strategies utilized in covert transmission. With the emergence of reflecting intelligent surface and its application in covert communications, we propose a hybrid relay-reflecting intelligent surface (HR-RIS)-assisted strategy to further enhance the performance of covert communications, which simultaneously improves the signal strength received at the legitimate receiver and degrades that at the warden relying on optimizing both the phase and the amplitude of the HR-RIS elements. The numerical results show that the proposed HR-RIS-assisted strategy significantly outperforms the conventional RIS-aided strategy in terms of covert rate

Covert Communication in UAV-Assisted Air-Ground Networks

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assisted communication is a promising technique for future wireless networks due to its characteristics of low cost and flexible deployment. However, the high possibility of line-of-sight (LoS) air-ground channels may result in a great risk of being attacked by malicious users. Especially compared to the encryption and physical layer security that prevent eavesdropping, covert communication aims at hiding the existence of transmission, which is able to satisfy the more critical requirement of security. Thus, in this article, we focus on the covert communication issues of UAV-assisted wireless networks. First, the preliminaries of secure communications including encryption, physical layer security and covert communication are discussed. Then, current works and typical applications of UAV in covert communications are demonstrated. We then propose two schemes to enhance the covertness of UAV-assisted networks for some typical scenarios. Specifically, to improve the covert rate in UAV-assisted data dissemination, an iterative algorithm is proposed to jointly optimize the time slot, transmit power and trajectory. For the covertness of ground-air communication, a friendly jammer is employed to confuse the wardens, where the location of the jammer, the jamming power and the legitimate transmit power are jointly optimized. Numerical results are presented to validate the performance of these two proposed schemes. Finally, several challenges and promising directions are pointed out