Semantic Security with Practical Transmission Schemes over Fading Wiretap Channels

Abstract

Abstract:We propose and assess an on-off protocol for communication over wireless wiretap channels with security at the physical layer. By taking advantage of suitable cryptographic primitives, the protocol we propose allows two legitimate parties to exchange confidential messages with some chosen level of semantic security against passive eavesdroppers, and without needing either pre-shared secret keys or public keys. The proposed method leverages the noisy and fading nature of the channel and exploits coding and all-or-nothing transforms to achieve the desired level of semantic security. We show that the use of fake packets in place of skipped transmissions during low channel quality periods yields significant advantages in terms of time needed to complete transmission of a secret message. Numerical examples are provided considering coding and modulation schemes included in the WiMax standard, thus showing that the proposed approach is feasible even with existing practical devices.

Rate Adaptation for Secure HARQ Protocols

“…It is worthwhile to mention that the notion of secrecy may be defined in many different ways, including "perfect", "weak" and "strong secrecy" [31], "effective secrecy", "privacy" and "stealth" [46], "semantic security" [47], [48], or "covert communications" [49], [50]. Each of these notions provides different degrees of secrecy, based on probabilistic arguments or worst case scenarios.…”