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

On the Secrecy Degress of Freedom of the Multi-Antenna Block Fading Wiretap Channels

We consider the multi-antenna wiretap channel in which the transmitter wishes to send a confidential message to its receiver while keeping it secret to the eavesdropper. It has been known that the secrecy capacity of such a channel does not increase with signal-to-noise ratio when the transmitter has no channel state information (CSI) under mild conditions. Motivated by Jafar's robust interference alignment technique, we study the so-called staggered multi-antenna block-fading wiretap channel where the legitimate receiver and the eavesdropper have different temporal correlation structures. Assuming no CSI at transmitter, we characterize lower and upper bounds on the secrecy degrees of freedom (s.d.o.f.) of the channel at hand. Our results show that a positive s.d.o.f. can be ensured whenever two receivers experience different fading variation. Remarkably, very simple linear precoding schemes provide the optimal s.d.o.f. in some cases of interest.Comment: to appear in Proc. of IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT2010

Two-Way Training for Discriminatory Channel Estimation in Wireless MIMO Systems

This work examines the use of two-way training to efficiently discriminate the channel estimation performances at a legitimate receiver (LR) and an unauthorized receiver (UR) in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless system. This work improves upon the original discriminatory channel estimation (DCE) scheme proposed by Chang et al where multiple stages of feedback and retraining were used. While most studies on physical layer secrecy are under the information-theoretic framework and focus directly on the data transmission phase, studies on DCE focus on the training phase and aim to provide a practical signal processing technique to discriminate between the channel estimation performances at LR and UR. A key feature of DCE designs is the insertion of artificial noise (AN) in the training signal to degrade the channel estimation performance at UR. To do so, AN must be placed in a carefully chosen subspace based on the transmitter's knowledge of LR's channel in order to minimize its effect on LR. In this paper, we adopt the idea of two-way training that allows both the transmitter and LR to send training signals to facilitate channel estimation at both ends. Both reciprocal and non-reciprocal channels are considered and a two-way DCE scheme is proposed for each scenario. {For mathematical tractability, we assume that all terminals employ the linear minimum mean square error criterion for channel estimation. Based on the mean square error (MSE) of the channel estimates at all terminals,} we formulate and solve an optimization problem where the optimal power allocation between the training signal and AN is found by minimizing the MSE of LR's channel estimate subject to a constraint on the MSE achievable at UR. Numerical results show that the proposed DCE schemes can effectively discriminate between the channel estimation and hence the data detection performances at LR and UR.Comment: 1