Physical layer security jamming: Theoretical limits and practical designs in wireless networks

Physical layer security has been recently recognized as a promising new design paradigm to provide security in wireless networks. In addition to the existing conventional cryptographic methods, physical layer security exploits the dynamics of fading channels to enhance secured wireless links. In this approach, jamming plays a key role by generating noise signals to confuse the potential eavesdroppers, and significantly improves quality and reliability of secure communications between legitimate terminals. This article presents theoretical limits and practical designs of jamming approaches for physical layer security. In particular, the theoretical limits explore the achievable secrecy rates of user cooperation based jamming whilst the centralized, and game theoretic based precoding techniques are reviewed for practical implementations. In addition, the emerging wireless energy harvesting techniques are exploited to harvest the required energy to transmit jamming signals. Future directions of these approaches, and the associated research challenges are also briefly outlined

Physical layer security jamming : Theoretical limits and practical designs in wireless networks

Physical layer security has been recently recognized as a promising new design paradigm to provide security in wireless networks. In addition to the existing conventional cryptographic methods, physical layer security exploits the dynamics of fading channels to enhance secured wireless links. In this approach, jamming plays a key role by generating noise signals to confuse the potential eavesdroppers, and significantly improves quality and reliability of secure communications between legitimate terminals. This article presents theoretical limits and practical designs of jamming approaches for physical layer security. In particular, the theoretical limits explore the achievable secrecy rates of user cooperation based jamming whilst the centralized, and game theoretic based precoding techniques are reviewed for practical implementations. In addition, the emerging wireless energy harvesting techniques are exploited to harvest the required energy to transmit jamming signals. Future directions of these approaches, and the associated research challenges are also briefly outlined

Secrecy outage performance analysis for energy harvesting sensor networks with a jammer using relay selection strategy

In this paper, we study radio frequency energy harvesting (EH) in a wireless sensor network in the presence of multiple eavesdroppers (EAVs). Specifically, the sensor source and multiple sensor relays harvest energy from multiple power transfer stations (PTSs), and then, the source uses this harvested energy to transmit information to the base station (BS) with the help of the relays. During the transmission of information, the BS typically faces a risk of losing information due to the EAVs. Thus, to enhance the secrecy of the considered system, one of the relays acts as a jammer, using harvested energy to generate interference with the EAVs. We propose a best-relay-and-best-jammer scheme for this purpose and compare this scheme with other previous schemes. The exact closed-form expression for the secrecy outage probability (SOP) is obtained and is validated through Monte Carlo simulations. A near-optimal EH time algorithm is also proposed. In addition, the effects on the SOP of key system parameters such as the EH efficiency coefficient, the EH time, the distance between the relay and BS, the number of PTSs, the number of relays, and the number of EAVs are investigated. The results indicate that the proposed scheme generally outperforms both the best-relay-and-random-jammer scheme and the random-relay-and-best-jammer scheme in terms of the secrecy capacity

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 Secrecy Performance for Energy-Harvesting Multi-Antenna Relaying Networks with a Dual-Use Source

This paper studies the secrecy performance of an energy-harvesting relaying system in the presence of a dual-use source node and an eavesdropper. Specifically, the source has dual roles in the dual-hop communication: 1) to transmit confidential information in the first hop; 2) to generate jamming signal to interfere the eavesdropper in the second hop. Moreover, the multi-antenna relay deploys a power-splitting harvesting scheme to coordinate the information receiving and energy harvesting, and adopts maximal ratio combining technique to process the multiple copies of signals. Considering decode-and-forward protocol and transmit antenna selection scheme, we derive an analytical expression for secrecy outage probability, and perform Monte Carlo simulation to validate the analysis. Analytical results show that the SOP performance with the dual-use source node can be effectively improved when the relay-destination channel does not have absolute advantage over the relay-eavesdropper channel