Relay Selection for Wireless Communications Against Eavesdropping: A Security-Reliability Tradeoff Perspective

This article examines the secrecy coding aided wireless communications from a source to a destination in the presence of an eavesdropper from a security-reliability tradeoff (SRT) perspective. Explicitly, the security is quantified in terms of the intercept probability experienced at the eavesdropper, while the outage probability encountered at the destination is used to measure the transmission reliability. We characterize the SRT of conventional direct transmission from the source to the destination and show that if the outage probability is increased, the intercept probability decreases, and vice versa. We first demonstrate that the employment of relay nodes for assisting the source-destination transmissions is capable of defending against eavesdropping, followed by quantifying the benefits of single-relay selection (SRS) as well as of multi-relay selection (MRS) schemes. More specifically, in the SRS scheme, only the single "best" relay is selected for forwarding the source signal to the destination, whereas the MRS scheme allows multiple relays to participate in this process. It is illustrated that both the SRS and MRS schemes achieve a better SRT than the conventional direct transmission, especially upon increasing the number of relays. Numerical results also show that as expected, the MRS outperforms the SRS in terms of its SRT. Additionally, we present some open challenges and future directions for the wireless relay aided physical-layer security.Comment: 16 pages, IEEE Network, 201

Secure Multiuser Communications in Wireless Sensor Networks with TAS and Cooperative Jamming

In this paper, we investigate the secure transmission in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consisting of one multiple-antenna base station (BS), multiple single-antenna legitimate users, one single-antenna eavesdropper and one multiple-antenna cooperative jammer. In an effort to reduce the scheduling complexity and extend the battery lifetime of the sensor nodes, the switch-and-stay combining (SSC) scheduling scheme is exploited over the sensor nodes. Meanwhile, transmit antenna selection (TAS) is employed at the BS and cooperative jamming (CJ) is adopted at the jammer node, aiming at achieving a satisfactory secrecy performance. Moreover, depending on whether the jammer node has the global channel state information (CSI) of both the legitimate channel and the eavesdropper's channel, it explores a zero-forcing beamforming (ZFB) scheme or a null-space artificial noise (NAN) scheme to confound the eavesdropper while avoiding the interference to the legitimate user. Building on this, we propose two novel hybrid secure transmission schemes, termed TAS-SSC-ZFB and TAS-SSC-NAN, for WSNs. We then derive the exact closed-form expressions for the secrecy outage probability and the effective secrecy throughput of both schemes to characterize the secrecy performance. Using these closed-form expressions, we further determine the optimal switching threshold and obtain the optimal power allocation factor between the BS and jammer node for both schemes to minimize the secrecy outage probability, while the optimal secrecy rate is decided to maximize the effective secrecy throughput for both schemes. Numerical results are provided to verify the theoretical analysis and illustrate the impact of key system parameters on the secrecy performance.This work was supported by the National Science Foundation of China (No. 61501507), and the Jiangsu Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (No. BK20150719). The work of Nan Yang is supported by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project (DP150103905)

Rateless codes-based secure communication employing transmit antenna selection and harvest-to-jam under joint effect of interference and hardware impairments

In this paper, we propose a rateless codes-based communication protocol to provide security for wireless systems. In the proposed protocol, a source uses the transmit antenna selection (TAS) technique to transmit Fountain-encoded packets to a destination in presence of an eavesdropper. Moreover, a cooperative jammer node harvests energy from radio frequency (RF) signals of the source and the interference sources to generate jamming noises on the eavesdropper. The data transmission terminates as soon as the destination can receive a sufficient number of the encoded packets for decoding the original data of the source. To obtain secure communication, the destination must receive sufficient encoded packets before the eavesdropper. The combination of the TAS and harvest-to-jam techniques obtains the security and efficient energy via reducing the number of the data transmission, increasing the quality of the data channel, decreasing the quality of the eavesdropping channel, and supporting the energy for the jammer. The main contribution of this paper is to derive exact closed-form expressions of outage probability (OP), probability of successful and secure communication (SS), intercept probability (IP) and average number of time slots used by the source over Rayleigh fading channel under the joint impact of co-channel interference and hardware impairments. Then, Monte Carlo simulations are presented to verify the theoretical results.Web of Science217art. no. 70

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

Performance of multi-hop cognitive MIMO relaying networks with joint constraint of intercept probability and limited interference

In this paper, we propose a multi-hop multiple input multiple output (MIMO) decode-and-forward relaying protocol in cognitive radio networks. In this protocol, a multi-antenna secondary source attempts to send its data to a multi-antenna secondary destination with assistance of multiple intermediate multi-antenna nodes, in presence of a multi-antenna secondary eavesdropper. A primary network includes a primary transmitter and a primary receiver which are equipped with multiple antennas, and use transmit antenna selection (TAS) and selection combining (SC) to communicate with each other. Operating on the underlay spectrum sharing method, the secondary source and relay nodes have to adjust their transmit power so that the outage performance of the primary network is not harmful and satisfy the quality of service (QoS). Moreover, these secondary nodes also reduce their transmit power so that the intercept probability (IP) at the eavesdropper at each hop is below a desired value. To improve the outage performance of the secondary network under the joint constraint of IP and limited interference, the TAS/SC method is employed to relay the source data hop-by-hop to the destination. We derived exact closed-form expressions of the end-to-end (e2e) outage probability (OP) and IP of the proposed protocol over Rayleigh fading channels. Monte Carlo simulations are then performed to verify the theoretical derivations

Secure Analysis of Multi-Antenna Cooperative Networks with Residual Transceiver HIs and CEEs

In this paper, we investigate the secure performance of multi-antenna decode-and-forward (DF) relaying networks where the Nakagami-m fading channel is taken into account. In practice, the joint impact of residual transceiver hardware impairments (HIs) and channel estimation errors (CEEs) on the outage probability and intercept probability is taken into account. Considering HIs and CEEs, an optimal transmit antenna selection (OTAS) scheme is proposed to enhance the secure performance and then a collaborative eavesdropping scheme is proposed. Additionally, we present main channel capacity and intercept capacity of the multi-antenna DF relaying networks. More specifically, we derive exact closed-form expressions for the outage and intercept probabilities. To obtain useful insights into implications of parameters on the secure performance, the asymptotic behaviors for the outage probability are examined in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime and the diversity orders are obtained and discussed. Simulation results confirm the analytical derivations and demonstrate that: 1) As the power distribution coefficient increases, OP decreases, while IP increases; 2) There exist error floors for the outage probability at high SNRs, which is determined by CEEs; 3) The secure performance can be improved by increasing the number of source antennas and artificial noise quantization coefficient, while as the number of eavesdropping increases, the security performance of the system is reduced; 4) There is a trade-off between the outage probability and intercept probability

Analysis of probability of non-zero secrecy capacity for multi-hop networks in presence of hardware impairments over Nakagami-m fading channels

In this paper, we evaluate probability of non-zero secrecy capacity of multi-hop relay networks over Nakagamim fading channels in presence of hardware impairments. In the considered protocol, a source attempts to transmit its data to a destination by using multi-hop randomize-and-forward (RF) strategy. The data transmitted by the source and relays are overheard by an eavesdropper. For performance evaluation, we derive exact expressions of probability of non-zero secrecy capacity (PoNSC), which are expressed by sums of infinite series of exponential functions and exponential integral functions. We then perform Monte Carlo simulations to verify the theoretical analysis.Web of Science25478277