Information-theoretic Physical Layer Security for Satellite Channels

Shannon introduced the classic model of a cryptosystem in 1949, where Eve has access to an identical copy of the cyphertext that Alice sends to Bob. Shannon defined perfect secrecy to be the case when the mutual information between the plaintext and the cyphertext is zero. Perfect secrecy is motivated by error-free transmission and requires that Bob and Alice share a secret key. Wyner in 1975 and later I.~Csisz\'ar and J.~K\"orner in 1978 modified the Shannon model assuming that the channels are noisy and proved that secrecy can be achieved without sharing a secret key. This model is called wiretap channel model and secrecy capacity is known when Eve's channel is noisier than Bob's channel. In this paper we review the concept of wiretap coding from the satellite channel viewpoint. We also review subsequently introduced stronger secrecy levels which can be numerically quantified and are keyless unconditionally secure under certain assumptions. We introduce the general construction of wiretap coding and analyse its applicability for a typical satellite channel. From our analysis we discuss the potential of keyless information theoretic physical layer security for satellite channels based on wiretap coding. We also identify system design implications for enabling simultaneous operation with additional information theoretic security protocols

Previous Messages Provide the Key to Achieve Shannon Capacity in a Wiretap Channel

We consider a wiretap channel and use previously transmitted messages to generate a secret key which increases the secrecy capacity. This can be bootstrapped to increase the secrecy capacity to the Shannon capacity without using any feedback or extra channel while retaining the strong secrecy of the wiretap channel.Comment: Accepted for IEEE International Conference on Communications Workshop (ICC) 2013, Budapest, Hungary. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1404.570

Achieving Secrecy Capacity of the Gaussian Wiretap Channel with Polar Lattices

In this work, an explicit wiretap coding scheme based on polar lattices is proposed to achieve the secrecy capacity of the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) wiretap channel. Firstly, polar lattices are used to construct secrecy-good lattices for the mod-$\Lambda_s$ Gaussian wiretap channel. Then we propose an explicit shaping scheme to remove this mod-$\Lambda_s$ front end and extend polar lattices to the genuine Gaussian wiretap channel. The shaping technique is based on the lattice Gaussian distribution, which leads to a binary asymmetric channel at each level for the multilevel lattice codes. By employing the asymmetric polar coding technique, we construct an AWGN-good lattice and a secrecy-good lattice with optimal shaping simultaneously. As a result, the encoding complexity for the sender and the decoding complexity for the legitimate receiver are both O(N logN log(logN)). The proposed scheme is proven to be semantically secure.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Trans. Information Theory, revised. This is the authors' own version of the pape