Secure Satellite Communication Systems Design with Individual Secrecy Rate Constraints

In this paper, we study multibeam satellite secure communication through physical (PHY) layer security techniques, i.e., joint power control and beamforming. By first assuming that the Channel State Information (CSI) is available and the beamforming weights are fixed, a novel secure satellite system design is investigated to minimize the transmit power with individual secrecy rate constraints. An iterative algorithm is proposed to obtain an optimized power allocation strategy. Moreover, sub-optimal beamforming weights are obtained by completely eliminating the co-channel interference and nulling the eavesdroppers' signal simultaneously. In order to obtain jointly optimized power allocation and beamforming strategy in some practical cases, e.g., with certain estimation errors of the CSI, we further evaluate the impact of the eavesdropper's CSI on the secure multibeam satellite system design. The convergence of the iterative algorithm is proven under justifiable assumptions. The performance is evaluated by taking into account the impact of the number of antenna elements, number of beams, individual secrecy rate requirement, and CSI. The proposed novel secure multibeam satellite system design can achieve optimized power allocation to ensure the minimum individual secrecy rate requirement. The results show that the joint beamforming scheme is more favorable than fixed beamforming scheme, especially in the cases of a larger number of satellite antenna elements and higher secrecy rate requirement. Finally, we compare the results under the current satellite air-interface in DVB-S2 and the results under Gaussian inputs.Comment: 34 pages, 10 figures, 1 table, submitted to "Transactions on Information Forensics and Security

Demo: iJam with Channel Randomization

Physical-layer key generation methods utilize the variations of the communication channel to achieve a secure key agreement between two parties with no prior security association. Their secrecy rate (bit generation rate) depends heavily on the randomness of the channel, which may reduce significantly in a stable environment. Existing methods seek to improve the secrecy rate by injecting artificial noise into the channel. Unfortunately, noise injection cannot alter the underlying channel state, which depends on the multipath environment between the transmitter and receiver. Consequently, these methods are known to leak key bits toward multi-antenna eavesdroppers, which is capable of filtering the noise through the differential of multiple signal receptions. This work demonstrates an improved approach to reinforce physical-layer key generation schemes, e.g., channel randomization. The channel randomization approach leverages a reconfigurable antenna to rapidly change the channel state during transmission, and an angle-of-departure (AoD) based channel estimation algorithm to cancel the changing effects for the intended receiver. The combined result is a communication channel stable in the eyes of the intended receiver but randomly changing from the viewpoint of the eavesdropper. We augmented an existing physical-layer key generation protocol, iJam, with the proposed approach and developed a full-fledged remote instrumentation platform to demonstrate its performance. Our evaluations show that augmentation does not affect the bit error rate (BER) of the intended receiver during key establishment but reduces the eavesdropper's BER to the level of random guessing, regardless of the number of antennas it equips

Satellite-based Quantum Network: Security and Challenges over Atmospheric Channel

The ultra-secure quantum network leverages quantum cryptography to deliver unsurpassed data transfer security. In principle, the well-known quantum key distribution (QKD) achieves unconditional security, which raises concerns about the trustworthiness of 6G wireless systems in order to mitigate the gap between practice and theory. The long-distance satellite-to-ground evolving quantum network distributes keys that are ubiquitous to the node on the ground through low-orbit satellites. As the secret key sequence is encoded into quantum states, it is sent through the atmosphere via a quantum channel. It still requires more effort in the physical layer design of deployment ranges, transmission, and security to achieve high-quality quantum communication. In this paper, we first review the quantum states and channel properties for satellite-based quantum networks and long-range quantum state transfer (QST). Moreover, we highlight some challenges, such as transmissivity statistics, estimation of channel parameters and attack resilience, quantum state transfer for satellite-based quantum networks, and wavepacket shaping techniques over atmospheric channels. We underline two research directions that consider the QST and wavepacket shaping techniques for atmospheric transmission in order to encourage further research toward the next generation of satellite-based quantum networks.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, conferenc

Multi-factor Physical Layer Security Authentication in Short Blocklength Communication

Lightweight and low latency security schemes at the physical layer that have recently attracted a lot of attention include: (i) physical unclonable functions (PUFs), (ii) localization based authentication, and, (iii) secret key generation (SKG) from wireless fading coefficients. In this paper, we focus on short blocklengths and propose a fast, privacy preserving, multi-factor authentication protocol that uniquely combines PUFs, proximity estimation and SKG. We focus on delay constrained applications and demonstrate the performance of the SKG scheme in the short blocklength by providing a numerical comparison of three families of channel codes, including half rate low density parity check codes (LDPC), Bose Chaudhuri Hocquenghem (BCH), and, Polar Slepian Wolf codes for n=512, 1024. The SKG keys are incorporated in a zero-round-trip-time resumption protocol for fast re-authentication. All schemes of the proposed mutual authentication protocol are shown to be secure through formal proofs using Burrows, Abadi and Needham (BAN) and Mao and Boyd (MB) logic as well as the Tamarin-prover

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

Vehicle Communication using Secrecy Capacity

We address secure vehicle communication using secrecy capacity. In particular, we research the relationship between secrecy capacity and various types of parameters that determine secrecy capacity in the vehicular wireless network. For example, we examine the relationship between vehicle speed and secrecy capacity, the relationship between the response time and secrecy capacity of an autonomous vehicle, and the relationship between transmission power and secrecy capacity. In particular, the autonomous vehicle has set the system modeling on the assumption that the speed of the vehicle is related to the safety distance. We propose new vehicle communication to maintain a certain level of secrecy capacity according to various parameters. As a result, we can expect safer communication security of autonomous vehicles in 5G communications.Comment: 17 Pages, 12 Figure