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

Solutions for the MIMO Gaussian Wiretap Channel with a Cooperative Jammer

We study the Gaussian MIMO wiretap channel with a transmitter, a legitimate receiver, an eavesdropper and an external helper, each equipped with multiple antennas. The transmitter sends confidential messages to its intended receiver, while the helper transmits jamming signals independent of the source message to confuse the eavesdropper. The jamming signal is assumed to be treated as noise at both the intended receiver and the eavesdropper. We obtain a closed-form expression for the structure of the artificial noise covariance matrix that guarantees no decrease in the secrecy capacity of the wiretap channel. We also describe how to find specific realizations of this covariance matrix expression that provide good secrecy rate performance, even when there is no non-trivial null space between the helper and the intended receiver. Unlike prior work, our approach considers the general MIMO case, and is not restricted to SISO or MISO scenarios