Biblio

This paper considers the transmission of confidential data over wireless channels. Based on an information-theoretic formulation of the problem, in which two legitimates partners communicate over a quasi-static fading channel and an eavesdropper observes their transmissions through a second independent quasi-static fading channel, the important role of fading is characterized in terms of average secure communication rates and outage probability. Based on the insights from this analysis, a practical secure communication protocol is developed, which uses a four-step procedure to ensure wireless information-theoretic security: (i) common randomness via opportunistic transmission, (ii) message reconciliation, (iii) common key generation via privacy amplification, and (iv) message protection with a secret key. A reconciliation procedure based on multilevel coding and optimized low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes is introduced, which allows to achieve communication rates close to the fundamental security limits in several relevant instances. Finally, a set of metrics for assessing average secure key generation rates is established, and it is shown that the protocol is effective in secure key renewal-even in the presence of imperfect channel state information.

Secret key generation from wireless channel is an emerging technique of physical layer security. At present, most of the secret key generation schemes use information reconciliation to obtain symmetric keys. This paper introduces a non-interactive information reconciliation scheme based on channel coding and stream encryption, and considering the error correction capability, we design a concatenated code of BCH and RS codes as channel coding. The performance of concatenated error correction code has been analyzed in this scheme. Then, we compare the concatenated code with first-level error correction code in different test environments. Extensive numerical simulations and experiments demonstrate that the decoding performance of this second-level concatenated code is better than the first-level error correction code, and it can also effectively eliminate third-party eavesdropping.

Multipath fading as well as shadowing is liable for the leakage of confidential information from the wireless channels. In this paper a solution to this information leakage is proposed, where a source transmits signal through a α-μ/α-μ composite fading channel considering an eavesdropper is present in the system. Secrecy enhancement is investigated with the help of two fading parameters α and μ. To mitigate the impacts of shadowing a α-μ distribution is considered whose mean is another α-μ distribution which helps to moderate the effects multipath fading. The mathematical expressions of some secrecy matrices such as the probability of non-zero secrecy capacity and the secure outage probability are obtained in closed-form to analyze security of the wireless channel in light of the channel parameters. Finally, Monte-Carlo simulations are provided to justify the correctness of the derived expressions.

The rapid growth of the connected devices driven by Internet of Things (IoT) concept requires a complete rethinking of the conventional approaches for the network design. One of the key constraints of the IoT devices are their low capabilities in order to optimize energy consumption. On the other hand, many IoT applications require high level of data protection and privacy, which can be provided only by advanced cryptographic algorithms, which are not feasible for IoT devices. In this paper, we propose a scalable quadrature modulation aiming to solve the problem of secure communications at the physical layer. The key idea of the proposed approach is to transmit only part of information in way that allows target receiver to retrieve the complete information. Such approach allows to ensure the security of wireless channel, while reducing the overhead of advanced cryptographic algorithms.

The dynamic nature of the wireless channel poses a challenge to services requiring seamless and uniform network quality of service (QoS). Self-healing, a promising approach under the self-organizing networks (SON) paradigm, and has been shown to deal with unexpected network faults in cellular networks. In this paper, we use simple machine learning (ML) algorithms inspired by SON developments in cellular networks. Evaluation results show that the proposed approach identifies the faulty APs. Our proposed approach improves throughput by 63.6% and reduces packet loss rate by 16.6% compared with standard 802.11.

In this paper, we address the fundamental problem of securely bootstrapping a group of wireless devices to a hub, when none of the devices share prior associations (secrets) with the hub or between them. This scenario aligns with the secure deployment of body area networks, IoT, medical devices, industrial automation sensors, autonomous vehicles, and others. We develop VERSE, a physical-layer group message integrity verification primitive that effectively detects advanced wireless signal manipulations that can be used to launch man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks over wireless. Without using shared secrets to establish authenticated channels, such attacks are notoriously difficult to thwart and can undermine the authentication and key establishment processes. VERSE exploits the existence of multiple devices to verify the integrity of the messages exchanged within the group. We then use VERSE to build a bootstrapping protocol, which securely introduces new devices to the network. Compared to the state-of-the-art, VERSE achieves in-band message integrity verification during secure pairing using only the RF modality without relying on out-of-band channels or extensive human involvement. It guarantees security even when the adversary is capable of fully controlling the wireless channel by annihilating and injecting wireless signals. We study the limits of such advanced wireless attacks and prove that the introduction of multiple legitimate devices can be leveraged to increase the security of the pairing process. We validate our claims via theoretical analysis and extensive experimentations on the USRP platform. We further discuss various implementation aspects such as the effect of time synchronization between devices and the effects of multipath and interference. Note that the elimination of shared secrets, default passwords, and public key infrastructures effectively addresses the related key management challenges when these are considered at scale.