Secure Communication with a Wireless-Powered Friendly Jammer

In this paper, we propose to use a wireless-powered friendly jammer to enable secure communication between a source node and destination node, in the presence of an eavesdropper. We consider a two-phase communication protocol with fixed-rate transmission. In the first phase, wireless power transfer is conducted from the source to the jammer. In the second phase, the source transmits the information-bearing signal under the protection of a jamming signal sent by the jammer using the harvested energy in the first phase. We analytically characterize the long-time behavior of the proposed protocol and derive a closed-form expression for the throughput. We further optimize the rate parameters for maximizing the throughput subject to a secrecy outage probability constraint. Our analytical results show that the throughput performance differs significantly between the single-antenna jammer case and the multi-antenna jammer case. For instance, as the source transmit power increases, the throughput quickly reaches an upper bound with single-antenna jammer, while the throughput grows unbounded with multi-antenna jammer. Our numerical results also validate the derived analytical results.Comment: accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication

A Secure Communication Game with a Relay Helping the Eavesdropper

In this work a four terminal complex Gaussian network composed of a source, a destination, an eavesdropper and a jammer relay is studied under two different set of assumptions: (i) The jammer relay does not hear the source transmission, and (ii) The jammer relay is causally given the source message. In both cases the jammer relay assists the eavesdropper and aims to decrease the achievable secrecy rates. The source, on the other hand, aims to increase it. To help the eavesdropper, the jammer relay can use pure relaying and/or send interference. Each of the problems is formulated as a two-player, non-cooperative, zero-sum continuous game. Assuming Gaussian strategies at the source and the jammer relay in the first problem, the Nash equilibrium is found and shown to be achieved with mixed strategies in general. The optimal cumulative distribution functions (cdf) for the source and the jammer relay that achieve the value of the game, which is the Nash equilibrium secrecy rate, are found. For the second problem, the Nash equilibrium solution is found and the results are compared to the case when the jammer relay is not informed about the source message.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures, to appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, Special Issue on Using the Physical Layer for Securing the Next Generation of Communication Systems. This is the journal version of cs.IT:0911.008

A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances and Future Trends

This paper examines the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity, confidentiality, integrity and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state-of-the-art in physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer. We also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their counter-measures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive jammer, adaptive jammer and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.Comment: 36 pages. Accepted to Appear in Proceedings of the IEEE, 201

Correlated Jamming in a Joint Source Channel Communication System

We study correlated jamming in joint source-channel communication systems. An i.i.d. source is to be communicated over a memoryless channel in the presence of a correlated jammer with non-causal knowledge of user transmission. This user-jammer interaction is modeled as a zero sum game. A set of conditions on the source and the channel is provided for the existence of a Nash equilibrium for this game, where the user strategy is uncoded transmission and the jammer strategy is i.i.d jamming. This generalizes a well-known example of uncoded communication of a Gaussian sources over Gaussian channels with additive jamming. Another example, of a Binary Symmetric source over a Binary Symmetric channel with jamming, is provided as a validation of this result