Physical-Layer Security with Full-Duplex Transceivers and Multiuser Receiver at Eve

Full-duplex communication enables simultaneous transmission from both ends of a communication link, thereby promising significant performance gains. Generally, it has been shown that the throughput and delay gains of full-duplex communication are somewhat limited in realistic network settings, leading researchers to study other possible applications that can accord higher gains. The potential of full-duplex communication in improving the physical-layer security of a communication link is investigated in this contribution. We specifically present a thorough analysis of the achievable ergodic secrecy rate and the secrecy degrees of freedom with full-duplex communication in the presence of a half-duplex eavesdropper node, with both single-user decoding and multi-user decoding capabilities. For the latter case, an eavesdropper with successive interference cancellation and joint decoding capabilities is assumed. Irrespective of the eavesdropper capabilities and channel strengths, the ergodic secrecy rate with full-duplex communication is found to grow linearly with the log of the direct channel signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) as opposed to the flattened out secrecy rate with conventional half-duplex communication. Consequently, the secrecy degrees of freedom with full-duplex is shown to be two as opposed to that of zero in half-duplex mode

Power allocation and signal labelling on physical layer security

PhD ThesisSecure communications between legitimate users have received considerable attention recently. Transmission cryptography, which introduces secrecy on the network layer, is heavily relied on conventionally to secure communications. However, it is theoretically possible to break the encryption if unlimited computational resource is provided. As a result, physical layer security becomes a hot topic as it provides perfect secrecy from an information theory perspective. The study of physical layer security on real communication system model is challenging and important, as the previous researches are mainly focusing on the Gaussian input model which is not practically implementable. In this thesis, the physical layer security of wireless networks employing finite-alphabet input schemes are studied. In particular, firstly, the secrecy capacity of the single-input single-output (SISO) wiretap channel model with coded modulation (CM) and bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) is derived in closed-form, while a fast, sub-optimal power control policy (PCP) is presented to maximize the secrecy capacity performance. Since finite-alphabet input schemes achieve maximum secrecy capacity at medium SNR range, the maximum amount of energy that the destination can harvest from the transmission while satisfying the secrecy rate constraint is computed. Secondly, the effects of mapping techniques on secrecy capacity of BICM scheme are investigated, the secrecy capacity performances of various known mappings are compared on 8PSK, 16QAM and (1,5,10) constellations, showing that Gray mapping obtains lowest secrecy capacity value at high SNRs. We propose a new mapping algorithm, called maximum error event (MEE), to optimize the secrecy capacity over a wide range of SNRs. At low SNR, MEE mapping achieves a lower secrecy rate than other well-known mappings, but at medium-to-high SNRs MEE mapping achieves a significantly higher secrecy rate over a wide range of SNRs. Finally, the secrecy capacity and power allocation algorithm (PA) of finite-alphabet input wiretap channels with decode-and-forward (DF) relays are proposed, the simulation results are compared with the equal power allocation algorithm

Physical layer security solutions against passive and colluding eavesdroppers in large wireless networks and impulsive noise environments

Wireless networks have experienced rapid evolutions toward sustainability, scalability and interoperability. The digital economy is driven by future networked societies to a more holistic community of intelligent infrastructures and connected services for a more sustainable and smarter society. Furthermore, an enormous amount of sensitive and confidential information, e.g., medical records, electronic media, financial data, and customer files, is transmitted via wireless channels. The implementation of higher layer key distribution and management was challenged by the emergence of these new advanced systems. In order to resist various malicious abuses and security attacks, physical layer security (PLS) has become an appealing alternative. The basic concept behind PLS is to exploit the characteristics of wireless channels for the confidentiality. Its target is to blind the eavesdroppers such that they cannot extract any confidential information from the received signals. This thesis presents solutions and analyses to improve the PLS in wireless networks. In the second chapter, we investigate the secrecy capacity performance of an amplify-andforward (AF) dual-hop network for both distributed beamforming (DBF) and opportunistic relaying (OR) techniques. We derive the capacity scaling for two large sets; trustworthy relays and untrustworthy aggressive relays cooperating together with a wire-tapper aiming to intercept the message. We show that the capacity scaling in the DBF is lower bounded by a value which depends on the ratio between the number of the trustworthy and the untrustworthy aggressive relays, whereas the capacity scaling of OR is upper bounded by a value depending on the number of relays as well as the signal to noise ratio (SNR). In the third chapter, we propose a new location-based multicasting technique, for dual phase AF large networks, aiming to improve the security in the presence of non-colluding passive eavesdroppers. We analytically demonstrate that the proposed technique increases the security by decreasing the probability of re-choosing a sector that has eavesdroppers, for each transmission time. Moreover, we also show that the secrecy capacity scaling of our technique is the same as for broadcasting. Hereafter, the lower and upper bounds of the secrecy outage probability are calculated, and it is shown that the security performance is remarkably enhanced, compared to the conventional multicasting technique. In the fourth chapter, we propose a new cooperative protocol, for dual phase amplify-andforward large wireless sensor networks, aiming to improve the transmission security while taking into account the limited capabilities of the sensor nodes. In such a network, a portion of the K relays can be potential passive eavesdroppers. To reduce the impact of these untrustworthy relays on the network security, we propose a new transmission protocol, where the source agrees to share with the destination a given channel state information (CSI) of source-trusted relay-destination link to encode the message. Then, the source will use this CSI again to map the right message to a certain sector while transmitting fake messages to the other sectors. Adopting such a security protocol is promising because of the availability of a high number of cheap electronic sensors with limited computational capabilities. For the proposed scheme, we derived the secrecy outage probability (SOP) and demonstrated that the probability of receiving the right encoded information by an untrustworthy relay is inversely proportional to the number of sectors. We also show that the aggressive behavior of cooperating untrusted relays is not effective compared to the case where each untrusted relay is trying to intercept the transmitted message individually. Fifth and last, we investigate the physical layer security performance over Rayleigh fading channels in the presence of impulsive noise, as encountered, for instance, in smart grid environments. For this scheme, secrecy performance metrics were considered with and without destination assisted jamming at the eavesdropper’s side. From the obtained results, it is verified that the SOP, without destination assisted jamming, is flooring at high signal-to-noise-ratio values and that it can be significantly improved with the use of jamming