A Review of Physical Layer Security Techniques for Internet of Things: Challenges and Solutions

Abstract

With the uninterrupted revolution of communications technologies and the great-leap-forward development of emerging applications, the ubiquitous deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) is imperative to accommodate constantly growing user demands and market scales. Communication security is critically important for the operations of IoT. Among the communication security provisioning techniques, physical layer security (PLS), which can provide unbreakable, provable, and quantifiable secrecy from an information-theoretical point of view, has drawn considerable attention from both the academia and the industries. However, the unique features of IoT, such as low-cost, wide-range coverage, massive connection, and diversified services, impose great challenges for the PLS protocol design in IoT. In this article, we present a comprehensive review of the PLS techniques toward IoT applications. The basic principle of PLS is first briefly introduced, followed by the survey of the existing PLS techniques. Afterwards, the characteristics of IoT are identified, based on which the challenges faced by PLS protocol design are summarized. Then, three newly-proposed PLS solutions are highlighted, which match the features of IoT well and are expected to be applied in the near future. Finally, we conclude the paper and point out some further research directions.

Secrecy Performance Enhancement for Underlay Cognitive Radio Networks Employing Cooperative Multi-Hop Transmission with and without Presence of Hardware Impairments

“…Conventionally, encryption/decryption algorithms that generate public/private keys are used to guarantee the security [1,2]. Recently, a security framework for the physical layer, called the wiretap channel or physical-layer security (PLS) [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11], has been introduced as a potential solution. In PLS, difference between Shannon capacity of the data link and that of the eavesdropping link, named secrecy capacity, is commonly used to evaluate secrecy performance such as average secrecy capacity (ASC), secrecy outage probability (SOP) and probability of non-zero secrecy capacity (PNSC).…”

Physical Layer Security in a Hybrid TPSR Two-Way Half-Duplex Relaying Network over a Rayleigh Fading Channel: Outage and Intercept Probability Analysis

“…where and AE BE h h are the channel gain of the A-E and B-E links, respectively, and E n is AWGN with variance N0. During the broadcast signal phase, E also overhears the information from R. Hence, the received signal at E can be given by (12) The signal to noise ratio (SNR) at node A can be formulated as…”

“…Due to its simple implementation (i.e., only exploiting characteristics of the wireless medium such as link distance and channel state information), PLS can be implemented efficiently in wireless communication networks, internet-of-things (IoT) networks, etc. [9][10][11][12][13][14]. The authors of [15] investigated a joint relay selection and power scheme to enhance the PLS of a cooperative network with a multiple-antenna source and a single-antenna destination in the presence of untrusted relays and passive eavesdroppers.…”

Statistical and Machine Learning-Based Decision Techniques for Physical Layer Authentication

“…For this reason, a recent trend in the literature is focused on PLS solutions for IoT applications [1], [2], [3], [4]. Lowcomplexity security frameworks for key generation based on PLS have also been proposed [5], together with solutions that consider adversaries having infinite computational capabilities [6] over realistic wireless channels [7].…”