No abstract

In our previous work, we have shown that hybrid ARQ (HARQ) can be used to achieve secret communication over a fast fading channel. This is a physical-layer technique that can be used in conjunction with conventional cryptography to provide further protection from an eavesdropper. The key to our previous work was to use reliability-based HARQ to improve the decoder performance at the desired user much faster than at an eavesdropper. In this paper, we propose a new HARQ approach that provides better secrecy performance by using the most-reliable received bits at the desired user to obfuscate information transmitted in the HARQ process. In addition, we present several other performance improvements, including transmitting incremental redundancy instead of repeating information and using bit-interleaved coded modulation with higher-order modulation. Performance measures such as information rate and fractional equivocation rate are provided to demonstrate that the obfuscated incremental-redundancy HARQ protocol is a promising candidate for secret sharing.

We consider the problem of two sources wanting to share information through a potentially untrustworthy intermediary node. We assume that the two sources transmit random symbols simultaneously and that the intermediary node relays the information in the amplify-and-forward manner. We show that under a certain sufficient condition on the channel, it is possible to asymptotically detect whether or not the intermediary node is degrading the channel by sending out manipulated symbols. This can be done solely by each source examining its received distribution conditioned on what it transmitted; thus allowing for a minimally invasive approach to determining if the intermediary node is acting maliciously. More specifically, we model the potential malicious action of the intermediate node by an "attack" channel. An estimate of the attack channel is obtained from the received conditional distribution empirically observed by a source node. We show that the estimated attack channel converges in probability to the true attack channel if the intermediate node is not acting maliciously. Otherwise there is a separation between the estimated and true attacking channels with high probability. This result provides us a clear-cut criterion to determine whether the intermediate node is malicious or not.

Abstract-If Alice must communicate with Bob over a channel shared with the adversarial Eve, then Bob must be able to validate the authenticity of the message. In particular we consider the model where Alice and Eve share a discrete memoryless multiple access channel with Bob, thus allowing simultaneous transmissions from Alice and Eve. By traditional random coding arguments, we demonstrate an inner bound on the rate at which Alice may transmit, while still granting Bob the ability to authenticate. Furthermore this is accomplished in spite of Alice and Bob lacking a pre-shared key, as well as allowing Eve prior knowledge of both the codebook Alice and Bob share and the messages Alice transmits.

This paper presents a random coding scheme with which two nodes can exchange information with guaranteed integrity over a two-way Byzantine relay. This coding scheme is employed to obtain an inner bound on the capacity region with guaranteed information integrity. No pre-shared secret or secret transmission is needed for the proposed scheme. Hence the inner bound obtained is generally larger than those achieved based on secret transmission schemes. This approach advocates the separation of supporting information integrity and secrecy.