Due to the broadcast nature of radio propagation, the wireless air interface is open and accessible to both authorized and illegitimate users. This completely differs from a wired network, where communicating devices are physically connected through cables and a node without direct association is unable to access the network for illicit activities. The open communications environment makes wireless transmissions more vulnerable than wired communications to malicious attacks, including both the passive eavesdropping for data interception and the active jamming for disrupting legitimate transmissions. Therefore, this paper is motivated to examine 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. Several physical-layer security techniques are reviewed and compared, including information-theoretic security, artificial-noise-aided security, security-oriented beamforming, diversity-assisted security, and physical-layer key generation approaches. Since a jammer emitting radio signals can readily interfere with the legitimate wireless users, we also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their countermeasures, 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.
This article investigates the physical-layer security of cognitive radio (CR) networks, which are vulnerable to various newly arising attacks targeting on the weaknesses of CR communications and networking. We first review a range of physical-layer attacks in CR networks, including the primary user emulation, sensing falsification, intelligence compromise, jamming and eavesdropping attacks. Then we focus on the physical-layer security of CR networks against eavesdropping and examine the secrecy performance of cognitive communications in terms of secrecy outage probability. We further consider the use of relays for improving the CR security against eavesdropping and propose an opportunistic relaying scheme, where a relay node that makes CR communications most resistant to eavesdropping is chosen to participate in assisting the transmission from a cognitive source to its destination. It is illustrated that the physical-layer secrecy of CR communications relying on the opportunistic relaying can be significantly improved by increasing the number of relays, showing the security benefit of exploiting relay nodes.Finally, we present some open challenges in the field of relays assisted physical-layer security for CR networks. Index TermsCognitive radio, physical-layer security, primary user emulation, eavesdropping, opportunistic relaying.
Abstract-In this paper, we consider a multiple-input multipleoutput (MIMO) system consisting of one source, one destination and one eavesdropper, where each node is equipped with an arbitrary number of antennas. To improve the security of sourcedestination transmissions, we investigate the antenna selection at the source and propose the optimal antenna selection (OAS) and suboptimal antenna selection (SAS) schemes, depending on whether the source node has the global channel state information (CSI) of both the main link (from source to destination) and wiretap link (from source to eavesdropper). Also, the traditional space-time transmission (STT) is studied as a benchmark. We evaluate the secrecy performance of STT, SAS, and OAS schemes in terms of the probability of zero secrecy capacity. Furthermore, we examine the generalized secrecy diversity of STT, SAS, and OAS schemes through an asymptotic analysis of the probability of zero secrecy capacity, as the ratio between the average gains of the main and wiretap channels tends to infinity. This is different from the conventional secrecy diversity which assumes an infinite signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) received at the destination under the condition that the eavesdropper has a finite received SNR. It is shown that the generalized secrecy diversity orders of STT, SAS, and OAS schemes are the product of the number of antennas at source and destination. Additionally, numerical results show that the proposed OAS scheme strictly outperforms both the STT and SAS schemes in terms of the probability of zero secrecy capacity.
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