The Sender-Excited Secret Key Agreement Model: Capacity, Reliability and Secrecy Exponents

We consider the secret key generation problem when sources are randomly excited by the sender and there is a noiseless public discussion channel. Our setting is thus similar to recent works on channels with action-dependent states where the channel state may be influenced by some of the parties involved. We derive single-letter expressions for the secret key capacity through a type of source emulation analysis. We also derive lower bounds on the achievable reliability and secrecy exponents, i.e., the exponential rates of decay of the probability of decoding error and of the information leakage. These exponents allow us to determine a set of strongly-achievable secret key rates. For degraded eavesdroppers the maximum strongly-achievable rate equals the secret key capacity; our exponents can also be specialized to previously known results. In deriving our strong achievability results we introduce a coding scheme that combines wiretap coding (to excite the channel) and key extraction (to distill keys from residual randomness). The secret key capacity is naturally seen to be a combination of both source- and channel-type randomness. Through examples we illustrate a fundamental interplay between the portion of the secret key rate due to each type of randomness. We also illustrate inherent tradeoffs between the achievable reliability and secrecy exponents. Our new scheme also naturally accommodates rate limits on the public discussion. We show that under rate constraints we are able to achieve larger rates than those that can be attained through a pure source emulation strategy.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures; Submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory; Revised in Oct 201

Receiver Design and Security for Low Power Wireless Communications Systems

This dissertation focuses on two important areas in wireless communications: receiver design and security. In the first part of this dissertation we consider low data rate receiver design for ultra-wideband (UWB), a wideband radio technology that promises to help solve the frequency allocation problem that often inhibits narrowband systems. Reference-based receivers are promising candidates in the UWB regime, because the conventional rake receiver designs suffers from complexity limitations and inaccuracies in channel estimation. Many reference-based systems have arisen as viable solutions for receivers. We unify these systems as well as other systems into the general framework for performance analysis to suggest the optimal system for varying constraints. We improve the performance of frequency-shifted reference (FSR-UWB) for an average power constraint by halving the frequency offset and employing a sample-and-hold approach across the frame period. Also, we introduce a novel peak mitigation technique; tone reservation, for the multi-differential (MD) version of FSR-UWB, to reduce the high peak-to-average power ratio observed as the data carriers increase. The next part of this dissertation is about wireless security which is ubiquitous in modern news. Cryptography is widely use for security but it assumes limited computational abilities of an eavesdropper, is based on the unproven hardness of the underlying primitives, and allows for the message to be recorded and decrypted later. In this dissertation we consider an information-theoretic security approach to guaranteeing everlasting secrecy. We contribute a new secrecy rate pair outage formulation, where an outage event is based on the instantaneous rates of the destination and the eavesdropper being below and above desired thresholds, respectively. In our new secrecy rate pair outage formulation, two new unaccounted outage events emerge: secrecy breach, where the eavesdropper is above the targeted threshold; unreliable, where the destination is unable to successfully decode the message. The former case must be carefully avoided, while for the latter case we can exploit automatic retransmissions (ARQ) while maintaining the eavesdropper intercept probability below the target threshold. We look at both ``simple\u27\u27 receivers and also complex receivers that use a buffer to store previous messages to maximally combine signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Then we extend these results to the two-hop case where we maximize the end-to-end secure throughput by optimizing the intercept probability at each eavesdropper given a total end-to-end intercept constraint. Lastly, we consider the difficult case in information-theoretic security: the near eavesdropper case, where we contribute an optimal power allocation algorithm that leverages nearby chatter nodes to generate noise to reduce the probability of intercept by the eavesdropper while minimally impeding the source-to-destination communication. As shown in both one-hop and two-hop cases, allowing a slight outage at the destination for cases of when the eavesdropper is above a specific threshold greatly improves secrecy performance

Efficient Wireless Security Through Jamming, Coding and Routing

There is a rich recent literature on how to assist secure communication between a single transmitter and receiver at the physical layer of wireless networks through techniques such as cooperative jamming. In this paper, we consider how these single-hop physical layer security techniques can be extended to multi-hop wireless networks and show how to augment physical layer security techniques with higher layer network mechanisms such as coding and routing. Specifically, we consider the secure minimum energy routing problem, in which the objective is to compute a minimum energy path between two network nodes subject to constraints on the end-to-end communication secrecy and goodput over the path. This problem is formulated as a constrained optimization of transmission power and link selection, which is proved to be NP-hard. Nevertheless, we show that efficient algorithms exist to compute both exact and approximate solutions for the problem. In particular, we develop an exact solution of pseudo-polynomial complexity, as well as an epsilon-optimal approximation of polynomial complexity. Simulation results are also provided to show the utility of our algorithms and quantify their energy savings compared to a combination of (standard) security-agnostic minimum energy routing and physical layer security. In the simulated scenarios, we observe that, by jointly optimizing link selection at the network layer and cooperative jamming at the physical layer, our algorithms reduce the network energy consumption by half

Journal of Telecommunications and Information Technology, 2003, nr 4

kwartalni

Coding Techniques for Achieving Efficient Wireless Sensor Networks

In this dissertation, we explored multiple coding techniques to reduce energy consumption, improve performance, and secure wireless sensor networks specifically and ad-hoc networks in general. With the introduction of Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G technologies, wireless sensor networks are quickly emerging as an important and key technology in the future. From their ability to sense, process, and communicate data among them to being low-powered, self-organizing and cost effective. Their characteristics made them a great tool for many applications, they already have a role in connecting homes, cars, surveillance systems, early earthquake and forest fire detection. However, due to their limited power and processing energy, they suffer to maintain acceptable performance and connectivity especially when deployed in harsh environment. In this research, we demonstrated novel techniques that can help improve their performance while reducing energy consumption. The contribution of this work is summarized below. • We propose a novel approach to error correction codes in wireless sensor network. We introduce a modification to Reed-Solomon decoding algorithm which allows errors to occur in data without sacrificing the total integrity of the data. We show that by deploying such mechanisms, we can reduce the total energy required to deliver data at their destination by reducing the decoding energy per symbol/bit. • We propose a modification on opportunistic network coding (ONC) using diversity coding and cooperation, as well as, limiting the number of packets that can be network coded together to three and only encode packets that were received by relay nodes directly. We show that using such techniques we can alleviate the issues that plague ONC when implemented in noisy networks. We study the effect of link outages/mobility on proposed solution and show that our proposed solution can accommodate up to one link failure. • We study the security of ad-hoc networks and propose a post-quantum hybrid security mechanism. We propose a security mechanism that take advantage of the wireless medium hereditary nature and cryptography techniques. This state of art protocol is able to overcome the presence of adversary eavesdropper and address man in the middle attack. Our security mechanism uses a combination of physical layer and cryptographic security techniques to provide best effort security