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

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

Artificial-Noise-Aided Physical Layer Phase Challenge-Response Authentication for Practical OFDM Transmission

Recently, we have developed a PHYsical layer Phase Challenge-Response Authentication Scheme (PHY-PCRAS) for independent multicarrier transmission. In this paper, we make a further step by proposing a novel artificial-noise-aided PHY-PCRAS (ANA-PHY-PCRAS) for practical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmission, where the Tikhonov-distributed artificial noise is introduced to interfere with the phase-modulated key for resisting potential key-recovery attacks whenever a static channel between two legitimate users is unfortunately encountered. Then, we address various practical issues for ANA-PHY-PCRAS with OFDM transmission, including correlation among subchannels, imperfect carrier and timing recoveries. Among them, we show that the effect of sampling offset is very significant and a search procedure in the frequency domain should be incorporated for verification. With practical OFDM transmission, the number of uncorrelated subchannels is often not sufficient. Hence, we employ a time-separated approach for allocating enough subchannels and a modified ANA-PHY-PCRAS is proposed to alleviate the discontinuity of channel phase at far-separated time slots. Finally, the key equivocation is derived for the worst case scenario. We conclude that the enhanced security of ANA-PHY-PCRAS comes from the uncertainty of both the wireless channel and introduced artificial noise, compared to the traditional challenge-response authentication scheme implemented at the upper layer.Comment: 33 pages, 13 figures, submitted for possible publicatio

Physical-Layer Security Enhancement in Wireless Communication Systems

Without any doubt, wireless infrastructures and services have fundamental impacts on every aspect of our lives. Despite of their popularities, wireless communications are vulnerable to various attacks due to the open nature of radio propagation. In fact, communication security in wireless networks is becoming more critical than ever. As a solution, conventional cryptographic techniques are deployed on upper layers of network protocols. Along with direct attacks from lower layer, wireless security challenges come with the rapid evolution of sophisticated decipher techniques. Conventional security mechanisms are not necessarily effective against potential attacks from the open wireless environment anymore. As an alternative, physical-layer(PHY) security, utilizing unique features from lower layer, becomes a new research focus for many wireless communication systems. In this thesis, three mechanisms for PHY security enhancement are investigated. Beginning with a discussion on the security vulnerability in highly standardized infrastructures, the thesis proposed a time domain scrambling scheme of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system to improve the PHY security. The method relies on secretly scrambling each OFDM symbol in time domain, resulting in constellation transformation in frequency domain, to hide transmission features. As a complement to existing secrecy capacity maximization based optimal cooperative jamming systems, a security strategy based on the compromised secrecy region (CSR) minimization in cooperative jamming is then proposed when instantaneous channel state information(CSI) is not available. The optimal parameters of the jammer are derived to minimize the CSR which exhibits high secrecy outage probability. At last, security enhancement of OFDM system in cooperative networks is also investigated. The function selection strategies of cooperative nodes are studied. Our approach is capable of enhancing the security of broadband communications by selecting the proper function of each cooperative node. Numerical results demonstrate the feasibility of three proposed physical layer security mechanisms by examining the communication reliability, achievable CSR and secrecy capacity respectively

A collaborative physical layer security scheme

High level of security is essential in wireless 5G communications. The last few years there has been an increase in research interest in the potential of the radio channel’s physical properties to provide communications security. These research efforts investigate fading, interference, and path diversity to develop security techniques for implementation in 5G New Radio (NR). In this paper, we propose a collaborative scheme to existing physical layer security schemes, taking advantage of the characteristics of the OFDM technique. An OFDM symbol includes the pilot subcarriers, typically essential for the pilot channel estimation process performed at the legitimate receiver. In this work we propose the positions of the subcarriers to change on every OFDM symbol following a probability distribution known only to the legitimate transmitter and legitimate receiver. An eavesdropper, does not have access to the information of the pilot subcarriers positions so, it performs blind channel estimation. The theoretical analysis is based on the information theoretic problem formulation and is confirmed by simulations. The performance metrics used are the secrecy capacity and the outage probability. The proposed scheme is very simple and robust, strengthening security in multimedia applications

On the Achievable Error Region of Physical Layer Authentication Techniques over Rayleigh Fading Channels

For a physical layer message authentication procedure based on the comparison of channel estimates obtained from the received messages, we focus on an outer bound on the type I/II error probability region. Channel estimates are modelled as multivariate Gaussian vectors, and we assume that the attacker has only some side information on the channel estimate, which he does not know directly. We derive the attacking strategy that provides the tightest bound on the error region, given the statistics of the side information. This turns out to be a zero mean, circularly symmetric Gaussian density whose correlation matrices may be obtained by solving a constrained optimization problem. We propose an iterative algorithm for its solution: Starting from the closed form solution of a relaxed problem, we obtain, by projection, an initial feasible solution; then, by an iterative procedure, we look for the fixed point solution of the problem. Numerical results show that for cases of interest the iterative approach converges, and perturbation analysis shows that the found solution is a local minimum