Biblio

This paper assesses the impact on the performance that information-theoretic physical layer security (IT-PLS) introduces when integrated into a 5G New Radio (NR) system. For this, we implement a wiretap code for IT-PLS based on a modular coding scheme that uses a universal-hash function in its security layer. The main advantage of this approach lies in its flexible integration into the lower layers of the 5G NR protocol stack without affecting the communication's reliability. Specifically, we use IT-PLS to secure the transmission of downlink control information by integrating an extra pre-coding security layer as part of the physical downlink control channel (PDCCH) procedures, thus not requiring any change of the 3GPP 38 series standard. We conduct experiments using a real-time open-source 5G NR standalone implementation and use software-defined radios for over-the-air transmissions in a controlled laboratory environment. The overhead added by IT-PLS is determined in terms of the latency introduced into the system, which is measured at the physical layer for an end-to-end (E2E) connection between the gNB and the user equipment.

In this paper we use a seeded modular coding scheme for implementing physical layer security in a wiretap scenario. This modular scheme consists of a traditional coding layer and a security layer. For the traditional coding layer, we use a polar code. We evaluate the performance of the seeded modular coding scheme in an experimental setup with software defined radios and compare these results to simulation results. In order to assess the secrecy level of the scheme, we employ the distinguishing security metric. In our experiments, we compare the distinguishing error rate for different seeds and block lengths.