An Overview of Physical Layer Security with Finite-Alphabet Signaling

Providing secure communications over the physical layer with the objective of achieving perfect secrecy without requiring a secret key has been receiving growing attention within the past decade. The vast majority of the existing studies in the area of physical layer security focus exclusively on the scenarios where the channel inputs are Gaussian distributed. However, in practice, the signals employed for transmission are drawn from discrete signal constellations such as phase shift keying and quadrature amplitude modulation. Hence, understanding the impact of the finite-alphabet input constraints and designing secure transmission schemes under this assumption is a mandatory step towards a practical implementation of physical layer security. With this motivation, this article reviews recent developments on physical layer security with finite-alphabet inputs. We explore transmit signal design algorithms for single-antenna as well as multi-antenna wiretap channels under different assumptions on the channel state information at the transmitter. Moreover, we present a review of the recent results on secure transmission with discrete signaling for various scenarios including multi-carrier transmission systems, broadcast channels with confidential messages, cognitive multiple access and relay networks. Throughout the article, we stress the important behavioral differences of discrete versus Gaussian inputs in the context of the physical layer security. We also present an overview of practical code construction over Gaussian and fading wiretap channels, and we discuss some open problems and directions for future research.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials (1st Revision

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

Security-Enhanced SC-FDMA Transmissions Using Temporal Artificial-Noise and Secret Key Aided Schemes

We investigate the physical-layer security of uplink single-carrier frequency-division multiple-access (SC-FDMA) systems. Multiple users, Alices, send confidential messages to a common legitimate base-station, Bob, in the presence of an eavesdropper, Eve. To secure the legitimate transmissions, each user superimposes an artificial noise (AN) signal on the time-domain SC-FDMA data symbol. We reduce the computational and storage requirements at Bob's receiver by assuming simple per-sub-channel detectors. We assume that Eve has global channel knowledge of all links in addition to high computational capabilities, where she adopts high-complexity detectors such as single-user maximum likelihood (ML), multi-user minimum-mean-square-error, and multi-user ML. We analyze the correlation properties of the time-domain AN signal and illustrate how Eve can exploit them to reduce the AN effects. We prove that the number of useful AN streams that can degrade Eve's signal-to-noise ratio is dependent on the channel memories of Alices-Bob and Alices-Eve links. Furthermore, we enhance the system security for the case of partial Alices-Bob channel knowledge at Eve, where Eve only knows the precoding matrices of the data and AN signals instead of knowing the entire Alices-Bob channel matrices, and propose a hybrid security scheme that integrates temporal AN with channel-based secret key extraction. - 2019 IEEE.This work was supported by the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of the Qatar Foundation) through NPRP under Grant 8-627-2-260. The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the authors.Scopu