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

Secrecy Sum-Rates for Multi-User MIMO Regularized Channel Inversion Precoding

In this paper, we propose a linear precoder for the downlink of a multi-user MIMO system with multiple users that potentially act as eavesdroppers. The proposed precoder is based on regularized channel inversion (RCI) with a regularization parameter $\alpha$ and power allocation vector chosen in such a way that the achievable secrecy sum-rate is maximized. We consider the worst-case scenario for the multi-user MIMO system, where the transmitter assumes users cooperate to eavesdrop on other users. We derive the achievable secrecy sum-rate and obtain the closed-form expression for the optimal regularization parameter $\alpha_{\mathrm{LS}}$ of the precoder using large-system analysis. We show that the RCI precoder with $\alpha_{\mathrm{LS}}$ outperforms several other linear precoding schemes, and it achieves a secrecy sum-rate that has same scaling factor as the sum-rate achieved by the optimum RCI precoder without secrecy requirements. We propose a power allocation algorithm to maximize the secrecy sum-rate for fixed $\alpha$. We then extend our algorithm to maximize the secrecy sum-rate by jointly optimizing $\alpha$ and the power allocation vector. The jointly optimized precoder outperforms RCI with $\alpha_{\mathrm{LS}}$ and equal power allocation by up to 20 percent at practical values of the signal-to-noise ratio and for 4 users and 4 transmit antennas.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Communications, accepted for publicatio

Waveform Design for Secure SISO Transmissions and Multicasting

Wireless physical-layer security is an emerging field of research aiming at preventing eavesdropping in an open wireless medium. In this paper, we propose a novel waveform design approach to minimize the likelihood that a message transmitted between trusted single-antenna nodes is intercepted by an eavesdropper. In particular, with knowledge first of the eavesdropper's channel state information (CSI), we find the optimum waveform and transmit energy that minimize the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) at the output of the eavesdropper's maximum-SINR linear filter, while at the same time provide the intended receiver with a required pre-specified SINR at the output of its own max-SINR filter. Next, if prior knowledge of the eavesdropper's CSI is unavailable, we design a waveform that maximizes the amount of energy available for generating disturbance to eavesdroppers, termed artificial noise (AN), while the SINR of the intended receiver is maintained at the pre-specified level. The extensions of the secure waveform design problem to multiple intended receivers are also investigated and semidefinite relaxation (SDR) -an approximation technique based on convex optimization- is utilized to solve the arising NP-hard design problems. Extensive simulation studies confirm our analytical performance predictions and illustrate the benefits of the designed waveforms on securing single-input single-output (SISO) transmissions and multicasting

Secret-key Agreement with Channel State Information at the Transmitter

We study the capacity of secret-key agreement over a wiretap channel with state parameters. The transmitter communicates to the legitimate receiver and the eavesdropper over a discrete memoryless wiretap channel with a memoryless state sequence. The transmitter and the legitimate receiver generate a shared secret key, that remains secret from the eavesdropper. No public discussion channel is available. The state sequence is known noncausally to the transmitter. We derive lower and upper bounds on the secret-key capacity. The lower bound involves constructing a common state reconstruction sequence at the legitimate terminals and binning the set of reconstruction sequences to obtain the secret-key. For the special case of Gaussian channels with additive interference (secret-keys from dirty paper channel) our bounds differ by 0.5 bit/symbol and coincide in the high signal-to-noise-ratio and high interference-to-noise-ratio regimes. For the case when the legitimate receiver is also revealed the state sequence, we establish that our lower bound achieves the the secret-key capacity. In addition, for this special case, we also propose another scheme that attains the capacity and requires only causal side information at the transmitter and the receiver.Comment: 10 Pages, Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, Special Issue on Using the Physical Layer for Securing the Next Generation of Communication System