This study examines the use of nonsystematic channel codes to obtain secure
transmissions over the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) wire-tap channel.
Unlike the previous approaches, we propose to implement nonsystematic coded
transmission by scrambling the information bits, and characterize the bit error
rate of scrambled transmissions through theoretical arguments and numerical
simulations. We have focused on some examples of Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem
(BCH) and low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes to estimate the security gap,
which we have used as a measure of physical layer security, in addition to the
bit error rate. Based on a number of numerical examples, we found that such a
transmission technique can outperform alternative solutions. In fact, when an
eavesdropper (Eve) has a worse channel than the authorized user (Bob), the
security gap required to reach a given level of security is very small. The
amount of degradation of Eve's channel with respect to Bob's that is needed to
achieve sufficient security can be further reduced by implementing scrambling
and descrambling operations on blocks of frames, rather than on single frames.
While Eve's channel has a quality equal to or better than that of Bob's
channel, we have shown that the use of a hybrid automatic repeat-request (HARQ)
protocol with authentication still allows achieving a sufficient level of
security. Finally, the secrecy performance of some practical schemes has also
been measured in terms of the equivocation rate about the message at the
eavesdropper and compared with that of ideal codes.Comment: 29 pages, 10 figure