A Survey of Physical Layer Security Techniques for 5G Wireless Networks and Challenges Ahead

Physical layer security which safeguards data confidentiality based on the information-theoretic approaches has received significant research interest recently. The key idea behind physical layer security is to utilize the intrinsic randomness of the transmission channel to guarantee the security in physical layer. The evolution towards 5G wireless communications poses new challenges for physical layer security research. This paper provides a latest survey of the physical layer security research on various promising 5G technologies, including physical layer security coding, massive multiple-input multiple-output, millimeter wave communications, heterogeneous networks, non-orthogonal multiple access, full duplex technology, etc. Technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends of physical layer security in 5G and beyond are discussed.Comment: To appear in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication

Fundamental Constraints on Multicast Capacity Regions

Much of the existing work on the broadcast channel focuses only on the sending of private messages. In this work we examine the scenario where the sender also wishes to transmit common messages to subsets of receivers. For an L user broadcast channel there are 2L - 1 subsets of receivers and correspondingly 2L - 1 independent messages. The set of achievable rates for this channel is a 2L - 1 dimensional region. There are fundamental constraints on the geometry of this region. For example, observe that if the transmitter is able to simultaneously send L rate-one private messages, error-free to all receivers, then by sending the same information in each message, it must be able to send a single rate-one common message, error-free to all receivers. This swapping of private and common messages illustrates that for any broadcast channel, the inclusion of a point R* in the achievable rate region implies the achievability of a set of other points that are not merely component-wise less than R*. We formerly define this set and characterize it for L = 2 and L = 3. Whereas for L = 2 all the points in the set arise only from operations relating to swapping private and common messages, for L = 3 a form of network coding is required

A Secure Group Communication Architecture for Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This paper investigates the application of a secure group communication architecture to a swarm of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). A multicast secure group communication architecture for the low earth orbit (LEO) satellite environment is evaluated to determine if it can be effectively adapted to a swarm of UAVs and provide secure, scalable, and efficient communications. The performance of the proposed security architecture is evaluated with two other commonly used architectures using a discrete event computer simulation developed using MATLAB. Performance is evaluated in terms of the scalability and efficiency of the group key distribution and management scheme when the swarm size, swarm mobility, multicast group join and departure rates are varied. The metrics include the total keys distributed over the simulation period, the average number of times an individual UAV must rekey, the average bandwidth used to rekey the swarm, and the average percentage of battery consumed by a UAV to rekey over the simulation period. The proposed security architecture can successfully be applied to a swarm of autonomous UAVs using current technology. The proposed architecture is more efficient and scalable than the other tested and commonly used architectures. Over all the tested configurations, the proposed architecture distributes 55.2–94.8% fewer keys, rekeys 59.0–94.9% less often per UAV, uses 55.2–87.9% less bandwidth to rekey, and reduces the battery consumption by 16.9–85.4%

A Secure Group Communication Architecture for Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

This paper investigates the application of a secure group communication architecture to a swarm of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). A multicast secure group communication architecture for the low earth orbit (LEO) satellite environment is evaluated to determine if it can be effectively adapted to a swarm of UAVs and provide secure, scalable, and efficient communications. The performance of the proposed security architecture is evaluated with two other commonly used architectures using a discrete event computer simulation developed using MATLAB. Performance is evaluated in terms of the scalability and efficiency of the group key distribution and management scheme when the swarm size, swarm mobility, multicast group join and departure rates are varied. The metrics include the total keys distributed over the simulation period, the average number of times an individual UAV must rekey, the average bandwidth used to rekey the swarm, and the average percentage of battery consumed by a UAV to rekey over the simulation period. The proposed security architecture can successfully be applied to a swarm of autonomous UAVs using current technology. The proposed architecture is more efficient and scalable than the other tested and commonly used architectures. Over all the tested configurations, the proposed architecture distributes 55.2–94.8% fewer keys, rekeys 59.0–94.9% less often per UAV, uses 55.2–87.9% less bandwidth to rekey, and reduces the battery consumption by 16.9–85.4%

GPRKEY - A NOVEL GROUP KEY REKEYING TECHNIQUE FOR MANET

A Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of autonomous nodes or mobile devices that can arrange themselves in various ways and work without strict network administration. Ensuring security in mobile ad hoc networks is a challenging issue and most of the applications in mobile ad hoc networks involve group oriented communication. Mostly cryptographic techniques are used to provide the security to MANETs. Cryptographic techniques will not be efficient security mechanism if the key management is weak. The issue of packet loss in MANET that is caused due to multi casting and backward and forward secrecy results in mobility. Hence, we investigate on this issue and propose a method to overcome this scenario. On analysing the situation we find that frequent rekeying leads to huge message overhead and hence increases energy utilization. With the existing key management techniques it causes frequent disconnections and mobility issues. Therefore, an efficient multi casting group key management will help to overcome the above problems. In this paper we propose a novel group key rekeying technique named GPRKEY (Group key with Periodic ReKEYing) deal with scalability issue of rekeying and also analyze the performance of the newly proposed key management method using key trees. In this approach we use the periodic rekeying to enhance the scalability and avoid out of sync problems. We use sub trees and combine them using the merging algorithm and periodic re-keying algorithm. The GPRKEY is evaluated through NS-2 simulation and compared with existing key management techniques OFT (One-way Function Tree) and LKH (Logical Key Hierarchy). The security and performance of rekeying protocols are analyzed through detailed study and simulation

Security in Mobile Networks: Communication and Localization

Nowadays the mobile networks are everywhere. The world is becoming more dependent on wireless and mobile services, but the rapid growth of these technologies usually underestimates security aspects. As wireless and mobile services grow, weaknesses in network infrastructures become clearer. One of the problems is privacy. Wireless technologies can reduce costs, increase efficiencies, and make important information more readily and widely available. But, there are also risks. Without appropriate safeguards, these data can be read and modified by unauthorized users. There are many solutions, less and more effective, to protect the data from unauthorized users. But, a specific application could distinguish more data flows between authorized users. Protect the privacy of these information between subsets of users is not a trivial problem. Another problem is the reliability of the wireless service. Multi-vehicle systems composed of Autonomous Guided Vehicles (AGVs) are largely used for industrial transportation in manufacturing and logistics systems. These vehicles use a mobile wireless network to exchange information in order to coordinate their tasks and movements. The reliable dissemination of these information is a crucial operation, because the AGVs may achieve an inconsistent view of the system leading to the failure of the coordination task. This has clear safety implications. Going more in deep, even if the communication are confidential and reliable, anyway the positioning information could be corrupted. Usually, vehicles get the positioning information through a secondary wireless network system such as GPS. Nevertheless, the widespread civil GPS is extremely fragile in adversarial scenarios. An insecure distance or position estimation could produce security problems such as unauthorized accesses, denial of service, thefts, integrity disruption with possible safety implications and intentional disasters. In this dissertation, we face these three problems, proposing an original solution for each one