6 research outputs found
Physical Layer Security in Wireless Networks: Design and Enhancement.
PhDSecurity and privacy have become increasingly significant concerns in wireless communication
networks, due to the open nature of the wireless medium which makes the wireless
transmission vulnerable to eavesdropping and inimical attacking. The emergence and
development of decentralized and ad-hoc wireless networks pose great challenges to the
implementation of higher-layer key distribution and management in practice. Against
this background, physical layer security has emerged as an attractive approach for performing
secure transmission in a low complexity manner. This thesis concentrates on
physical layer security design and enhancement in wireless networks.
First, this thesis presents a new unifying framework to analyze the average secrecy
capacity and secrecy outage probability. Besides the exact average secrecy capacity
and secrecy outage probability, a new approach for analyzing the asymptotic behavior is
proposed to compute key performance parameters such as high signal-to-noise ratio slope,
power offset, secrecy diversity order, and secrecy array gain. Typical fading environments
such as two-wave with diffuse power and Nakagami-m are taken into account.
Second, an analytical framework of using antenna selection schemes to achieve secrecy
is provided. In particular, transmit antenna selection and generalized selection combining
are considered including its special cases of selection combining and maximal-ratio
combining.
Third, the fundamental questions surrounding the joint impact of power constraints on
the cognitive wiretap channel are addressed. Important design insights are revealed
regarding the interplay between two power constraints, namely the maximum transmit
at the secondary network and the peak interference power at the primary network.
Fourth, secure single carrier transmission is considered in the two-hop decode-andi
forward relay networks. A two-stage relay and destination selection is proposed to minimize
the eavesdropping and maximize the signal power of the link between the relay and
the destination. In two-hop amplify-and-forward untrusted relay networks, secrecy may
not be guaranteed even in the absence of external eavesdroppers. As such, cooperative
jamming with optimal power allocation is proposed to achieve non-zero secrecy rate.
Fifth and last, physical layer security in large-scale wireless sensor networks is introduced.
A stochastic geometry approach is adopted to model the positions of sensors, access
points, sinks, and eavesdroppers. Two scenarios are considered: i) the active sensors
transmit their sensing data to the access points, and ii) the active access points forward
the data to the sinks. Important insights are concluded
Joint Spatial and Spectrum Cooperation in Wireless Network.
PhDThe sky-rocketing growth of multimedia infotainment applications and broadband-hungry
mobile devices exacerbate the stringent demand for ultra high data rate and more spectrum resources. Along with it, the unbalanced temporal and geographical variations
of spectrum usage further inspires those spectral-efficient networks, namely, cognitive
radio and heterogeneous cellular networks (HCNs). This thesis focuses on the system
design and performance enhancement of cognitive radio (CR) and HCNs. Three different
aspects of performance improvement are considered, including link reliability of cognitive
radio networks (CNs), security enhancement of CNs, and energy efficiency improvement
of CNs and HCNs.
First, generalized selection combining (GSC) is proposed as an effective receiver design
for interference reduction and reliability improvement of CNs with outdated CSI. A uni-
ed way for deriving the distribution of received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is developed
in underlay spectrum sharing networks subject to interference from the primary trans-
mitter (PU-Tx) to the secondary receiver (SU-Rx), maximum transmit power constraint
at the secondary transmitter (SU-Tx), and peak interference power constraint at the
PU receiver (PU-Rx), is developed. Second, transmit antenna selection with receive
generalized selection combining (TAS/GSC) in multi-antenna relay-aided communica-
tion is introduced in CNs under Rayleigh fading and Nakagami-m fading. Based on
newly derived complex statistical properties of channel power gain of TAS/GSC, exact
ergodic capacity and high SNR ergodic capacity are derived over Nakagami-m fading.
Third, beamforming and arti cial noise generation (BF&AN) is introduced as a robust
scheme to enhance the secure transmission of large-scale spectrum sharing networks
with multiple randomly located eavesdroppers (Eves) modeled as homogeneous Poisson
Point Process (PPP). Stochastic geometry is applied to model and analyze the impact of
i
BF&AN on this complex network. Optimal power allocation factor for BF&AN which
maximizes the average secrecy rate is further studied under the outage probability con-
straint of primary network. Fourth, a new wireless energy harvesting protocol is proposed
for underlay cognitive relay networks with the energy-constrained SU-Txs. Exact and
asymptotic outage probability, delay-sensitive throughput, and delay-tolerant through-
put are derived to explore the tradeoff between the energy harvested from the PU-Txs
and the interference caused by the PU-Txs. Fifth, a harvest-then-transmit protocol is
proposed in K-tier HCNs with randomly located multiple-antenna base stations (BSs)
and single antenna mobile terminals (MTs) modeled as homogeneous PPP. The average
received power at MT, the uplink (UL) outage probability, and the UL average ergodic
rate are derived to demonstrate the intrinsic relationship between the energy harvested
from BSs in the downlink (DL) and the MT performance in the UL. Throughout the
thesis, it is shown that link reliability, secrecy performance, and energy efficiency of
CNs and HCNs can be signi cantly leveraged by taking advantage of multiple antennas,
relays, and wireless energy harvesting
Visible Light Communication Cyber Security Vulnerabilities For Indoor And Outdoor Vehicle-To-Vehicle Communication
Light fidelity (Li-Fi), developed from the approach of Visible Light Communication (VLC), is a great replacement or complement to existing radio frequency-based (RF) networks. Li-Fi is expected to be deployed in various environments were, due to Wi-Fi congestion and health limitations, RF should not be used. Moreover, VLC can provide the future fifth generation (5G) wireless technology with higher data rates for device connectivity which will alleviate the traffic demand. 5G is playing a vital role in encouraging the modern applications. In 2023, the deployment of all the cellular networks will reach more than 5 billion users globally. As a result, the security and privacy of 5G wireless networks is an essential problem as those modern applications are in people\u27s life everywhere. VLC security is as one of the core physical-layer security (PLS) solutions for 5G networks. Due to the fact that light does not penetrate through solid objects or walls, VLC naturally has higher security and privacy for indoor wireless networks compared to RF networks. However, the broadcasting nature of VLC caused concerns, e.g., eavesdropping, have created serious attention as it is a crucial step to validate the success of VLC in wild. The aim of this thesis is to properly address the security issues of VLC and further enhance the VLC nature security. We analyzed the secrecy performance of a VLC model by studying the characteristics of the transmitter, receiver and the visible light channel. Moreover, we mitigated the security threats in the VLC model for the legitimate user, by 1) implementing more access points (APs) in a multiuser VLC network that are cooperated, 2) reducing the semi-angle of LED to help improve the directivity and secrecy and, 3) using the protected zone strategy around the AP where eavesdroppers are restricted. According to the model\u27s parameters, the results showed that the secrecy performance in the proposed indoor VLC model and the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) VLC outdoor model using a combination of multiple PLS techniques as beamforming, secure communication zones, and friendly jamming is enhanced. The proposed model security performance was measured with respect to the signal to noise ratio (SNR), received optical power, and bit error rate (BER) Matlab simulation results
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Everlasting Secrecy by Exploiting Eavesdropper\u27s Receiver Non-Idealities
This dissertation focuses on secrecy, which is a primary concern in modern communication. Secrecy has traditionally been obtained by cryptography, which is based on assumptions on current and future computational capabilities of the eavesdropper. However, there are numerous examples of cryptographic schemes being broken that were supposedly secure, often when the signal was recorded by the adversary for later processing. This motivates seeking types of secrecy that are provably everlasting for sensitive applications. The desire for such everlasting security suggests considering information-theoretic approaches, where the eavesdropper cannot extract any information about the secret message from the received signal. However, since the location and channel state information of a passive eavesdropper is generally unknown, it is challenging to know whether the advantage required to achieve information-theoretic security for a given scenario is provided, and thus attempting to obtain information-theoretic security via commonly-envisioned approaches leads to a significant risk in wireless communication.
In this dissertation, we present a new perspective on how to generate the necessary information-theoretic advantage required for secret communication in the wireless environment. The proposed technique does not rely on the channel between the transmitter and the eavesdropper\u27s receiver because we exploit receiver\u27s processing effects for security. In particular, we attack the eavesdropper\u27s analog-to-digital (A/D) converter to generate the advantage required to obtain information-theoretic secrecy, as follows. Based on a key pre-shared between the legitimate nodes that only needs to be kept secret during transmission (and we pessimistically assume it will be handed to the adversary immediately afterward) we insert intentional distortion on the transmitted signal. Since the intended recipient of the signal knows the key and hence the distortion, it can undo the distortion before his/her A/D, whereas the eavesdropper must store the signal in memory and try to compensate for the distortion after the A/D conversion. Since the A/D is necessarily a non-linear component of the receiver, the operations are not necessarily commutative and there is the potential for information-theoretic security. This dissertation studies two practical instantiations of this approach to obtain everlasting secrecy against eavesdroppers with different hardware capabilities. As a first step, the transmitted signal is modulated by two vastly different power levels at the transmitter based on the key. Since the intended recipient knows the key, he/she can undo the power modulation before the A/D, putting the signal in the appropriate range for analog-to-digital conversion. The eavesdropper, on the other hand, must compromise between larger quantization noise and more A/D overflows, and thus will lose information required to recover the message. Hence, information-theoretic security is obtained. We show that this method can provide information-theoretic secrecy even when the eavesdropper has perfect access to the output of the transmitter, and even when the eavesdropper has an A/D that has better quality than the legitimate receiver\u27s A/D. A risk of the power modulation approach is a sophisticated eavesdropper with multiple A/Ds. In our second approach, in order to attack such an eavesdropper, we introduce the idea of adding random jamming (based on the ephemeral key) to the signal. In this case the intended recipient can simply subtract off the jamming signal and its signal will be well-matched to the span of its A/D converter, while the eavesdropper has difficulty because it does not know the key during transmission: if it does not change the span of the A/D, it will lose information due to A/D overflows, and, if it enlarges the span of the A/D to cover all possible received signal values, the width of each quantization level will be increased, and thus the eavesdropper will lose information due to high quantization noise. Hence, the desired advantage for information-theoretic secrecy is obtained. Finally, we study the combination of random jamming and frequency hopping in wideband channels, and show that considering the current fundamental limits of analog-to-digital conversion, this method can provide everlasting secrecy in wireless environments against any eavesdropper
Intrinsically secure communication in large-scale wireless networks
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 169-181).The ability to exchange secret information is critical to many commercial, governmental, and military networks. Information-theoretic security - widely accepted as the strictest notion of security - relies on channel coding techniques that exploit the inherent randomness of the propagation channels to significantly strengthen the security of digital communications systems. Motivated by recent developments in the field, this thesis aims at a characterization of the fundamental secrecy limits of large-scale wireless networks. We start by introducing an information-theoretic definition of the intrinsically secure communications graph (iS-graph), based on the notion of strong secrecy. The iS-graph is a random geometric graph which captures the connections that can be securely established over a large-scale network, in the presence of spatially scattered eavesdroppers. Using fundamental tools from stochastic geometry, we analyze how the spatial densities of legitimate and eavesdropper nodes influence various properties of the Poisson iS-graph, such as the distribution of node degrees, the node isolation probabilities, and the achievable secrecy rates. We study how the wireless propagation effects (e.g., fading and shadowing) and eavesdropper collusion affect the secrecy properties of the network. We also explore the potential of sectorized transmission and eavesdropper neutralization as two techniques for enhancing the secrecy of communications. We then shift our focus to the global properties of the iS-graph, which concern secure connectivity over multiple hops. We first characterize percolation of the Poisson iS-graph on the infinite plane. We show that each of the four components of the iS-graph (in, out, weak, and strong component) experiences a phase transition at some nontrivial critical density of legitimate nodes. Operationally, this is important because it implies that long-range communication over multiple hops is still feasible when a security constraint is present. We then consider full-connectivity on a finite region of the Poisson iS-graph. Specifically, we derive simple, explicit expressions that closely approximate the probability of a node being securely connected to all other nodes inside the region. We also show that the iS-graph is asymptotically fully out-connected with probability one, but full in-connectivity remains bounded away from one, no matter how large the density of legitimate nodes is made. Our results clarify how the spatial density of eavesdroppers can compromise the intrinsic security of wireless networks. We are hopeful that further efforts in combining stochastic geometry with information-theoretic principles will lead to a more comprehensive treatment of wireless security.by Pedro C. Pinto.Ph.D