Secrecy Capacity of a Class of Broadcast Channels with an Eavesdropper

We study the security of communication between a single transmitter and multiple receivers in a broadcast channel in the presence of an eavesdropper. We consider several special classes of channels. As the first model, we consider the degraded multi-receiver wiretap channel where the legitimate receivers exhibit a degradedness order while the eavesdropper is more noisy with respect to all legitimate receivers. We establish the secrecy capacity region of this channel model. Secondly, we consider the parallel multi-receiver wiretap channel with a less noisiness order in each sub-channel, where this order is not necessarily the same for all sub-channels. We establish the common message secrecy capacity and sum secrecy capacity of this channel. Thirdly, we study a special class of degraded parallel multi-receiver wiretap channels and provide a stronger result. In particular, we study the case with two sub-channels two users and one eavesdropper, where there is a degradedness order in each sub-channel such that in the first (resp. second) sub-channel the second (resp. first) receiver is degraded with respect to the first (resp. second) receiver, while the eavesdropper is degraded with respect to both legitimate receivers in both sub-channels. We determine the secrecy capacity region of this channel. Finally, we focus on a variant of this previous channel model where the transmitter can use only one of the sub-channels at any time. We characterize the secrecy capacity region of this channel as well.Comment: Submitted to EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking (Special Issue on Wireless Physical Layer Security

Rethinking the Intercept Probability of Random Linear Network Coding

This letter considers a network comprising a transmitter, which employs random linear network coding to encode a message, a legitimate receiver, which can recover the message if it gathers a sufficient number of linearly independent coded packets, and an eavesdropper. Closed-form expressions for the probability of the eavesdropper intercepting enough coded packets to recover the message are derived. Transmission with and without feedback is studied. Furthermore, an optimization model that minimizes the intercept probability under delay and reliability constraints is presented. Results validate the proposed analysis and quantify the secrecy gain offered by a feedback link from the legitimate receiver.Comment: IEEE Communications Letters, to appea

Practical LDPC coded modulation schemes for the fading broadcast channel with confidential messages

The broadcast channel with confidential messages is a well studied scenario from the theoretical standpoint, but there is still lack of practical schemes able to achieve some fixed level of reliability and security over such a channel. In this paper, we consider a quasi-static fading channel in which both public and private messages must be sent from the transmitter to the receivers, and we aim at designing suitable coding and modulation schemes to achieve such a target. For this purpose, we adopt the error rate as a metric, by considering that reliability (security) is achieved when a sufficiently low (high) error rate is experienced at the receiving side. We show that some conditions exist on the system feasibility, and that some outage probability must be tolerated to cope with the fading nature of the channel. The proposed solution exploits low-density parity-check codes with unequal error protection, which are able to guarantee two different levels of protection against noise for the public and the private information, in conjunction with different modulation schemes for the public and the private message bits.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, to be presented at IEEE ICC'14 - Workshop on Wireless Physical Layer Securit