The parallel distributed detection is studied for mobile wireless sensor networks (MWSNs) in the presence of Byzantine attacks in entirely unknown environment or complicated environment from the perspective of the information theory, where we pay most of our attention toward design, analysis, and evaluation of the attack strategy. In particular, the multihop relay network and the harsh wireless communication condition, e.g., the dynamic and entirely unknown channel, are taken into consideration in our configuration. Second, the conditions that the optimal attacking strategy should satisfy is analyzed and developed under different attacking scenarios. Third, the minimum attacking power is developed for the Byzantines to blind the fusion center (FC). Furthermore, the optimal attacking strategies are developed when no prior information of the system is known for the Byzantines. Finally, the traditional four typical attack strategies are evaluated, and we find that the fraction of Byzantines is the only factor that affects the reliable data fusion when the network size and the attacking strategy are fixed. The extensive simulation is conducted to verify our design, analysis, and evaluation of the attack strategy.

This paper investigates physical layer security (PLS) in wireless interference networks. Specifically, we consider confidential transmission from a legitimate transmitter (Alice) to a legitimate receiver (Bob), in the presence of non-colluding passive eavesdroppers (Eves), as well as multiple legitimate transceivers. To mitigate interference at legitimate receivers and enhance PLS, artificial noise (AN) aided interference alignment (IA) is explored. However, the conventional leakage minimization (LM) based IA may exhibit confidential signal cancellation phenomenon. We theoretically analyze the cause and then establish a condition under which this phenomenon will occur almost surely. Moreover, we propose a means of avoiding this phenomenon by integrating the max-eigenmode beamforming (MEB) into the traditional LM based IA. By assuming that only statistical channel state informations (CSIs) of Eves and local CSIs of legitimate users are available, we derive a closed form expression for the secrecy outage probability (SOP), and establish a condition under which positive secrecy rate is achievable. To enhance security performance, an SOP constrained secrecy rate maximization (SRM) problem is formulated and an efficient numerical method is developed for the optimal solution. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness and the usefulness of the proposed approach.

This article investigates energy-efficient secure communication design with the help of multiple phase-adjustable intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs). By creating desirable radiation patterns of wireless environment, the IRSs are used to significantly improve the number of bits securely delivered to the destination per energy consumption in Joule, also known as the secrecy energy efficiency (SEE). By manipulating the discrete reflecting coefficients of multiple IRSs and taking advantage of the active beamforming, this article develops an efficient alternating optimization algorithm based on successive convex approximation and penalty-based techniques to effectively fight against multiple eavesdroppers. Simulation results characterize the graceful tradeoff between conflicting performance metrics, i.e., total power consumption and secrecy rate in the multi-IRS-aided secure communication system, and corroborate that incorporating multiple IRSs is beneficial to both the SEE and secrecy rate enhancement compared to existing related benchmarks.

Effective energy design and secure communications are critical in the Internet of Things (IoT). A cooperative jamming (CJ) scheme based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is proposed for intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) aided secure cooperative network with eavesdroppers. Our goal is to maximize the average secrecy rate, or energy efficiency with secrecy constraints by jointly optimizing the transmit, jamming beamforming matrices, and IRS phase-shift matrix. In order to figure out the challenging nonconvex optimization problem, the deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) optimization algorithm is proposed to solve the energy efficiency maximization problem. In order to speed up task processing and reduce service delay, the edge computing server is employed for DRL training to improve computing speed and promote secure communication efficiency. By taking advantages of the features of proximity to end devices and computing resources, the edge devices provide a low latency efficient training support to the legal users and real-time control to the IRS units. By this way, a high security and low energy consumption IoT system is built. Numerical results show that the novel scheme improves the secrecy rate and energy efficiency compared with the benchmark scheme.

We investigate the physical layer security (PLS) in multi-user interference networks. In particular, we consider secure transmission from a legitimate source (Alice) to a legitimate destination (Bob), coexisting with multiple passive eavesdroppers (Eves), as well as multiple legitimate transceivers. By assuming that only statistical channel state informations (CSIs) of Eves and local CSIs of legitimate users are available, we propose an artificial noise (AN) assisted interference alignment (IA) for security enhancement. Unlike traditional IA based security approaches which may result in secret signal cancellation, we design a modified alternating minimization (AM) scheme to overcome this threat, by incorporating the max-eigenmode beamforming (MEB) for secure transmission. Moreover, by partitioning the IA equation into three independent subsets and their combinations, a much tighter necessary condition for IA feasibility is established. We also provide guiding insights into the practical system designs, including useful guidelines for the selection of the dimension of AN. Furthermore, the power allocation ratio between the secret signal and the AN signal is optimized to minimize the secrecy outage probability (SOP), subject to a minimum secrecy rate constraint. Numerical results demonstrate that our design can enhance both quality and security of the secret signal, and thus is suitable and reliable for PLS in interference networks.

Abstract This paper proposes a comprehensive study for the physical layer channel based authentication (PLA) designs in mmWave communications, which reveals the principles that how does the sparse properties of mmWave channel can benefit the PLA designs and performance. First, by fully investigating the channel perturbations of mmWave channel caused by the environmental changes within the channel coherence time, the generalized detection designs are investigated for mmWave channels. In general, it shows that the mmWave channel perturbations will seriously degrade the detection performance. To solve this problem, a lightweight but effective PLA scheme is proposed by fully utilizing the sparsity of mmWave channel. The key physical factors that impact the detection performance are fully investigated by conducting thoroughly theoretical analysis and simulations, and the detection spoofing probability of the scheme is show to be higher than 95%, while keeping the probability of false rate below 1%. The study indicates that channel sparsity is with great potential to design lightweight but effective PLA mechanisms for the future mmWave communication systems.

With the increasing demands for sharing confidential information among massive Internet of Things (IoT) devices in 5G and beyond wireless networks, many applications require the common secret key generation for a group of IoT devices. However, most of the existing works on physical layer secret key generation (PLKG) only focus on the pairwise key generation between two users, which is a low efficient and high cost to be extended to the scenarios of group key generation. In this work, we propose a new efficient multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) physical layer group secret key generation scheme to reduce the consumption of channel probing and improve the efficiency for group key generation. Different from current schemes, in the proposed scheme, the transmitter randomly generates the group secret key and directly broadcasts the downlink data symbols to the group users. At the receiver end, each group user can efficiently “observe” the common group key through the downlink broadcasting data symbols, while keeping perfect secrecy of the shared group key against eavesdroppers. The performance of reliability, security, and the group key generation rate is fully investigated, which shows the advantages of high efficiency, low consumption, and strong robustness of the proposed scheme. Extensive simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

Identity-based attacks (IBAs) are one of the most serious threats to wireless networks. Recently, there is an increasing interest in using the received signal strength (RSS) to detect IBAs in wireless networks. However, current schemes tend to generate excessive false alarms in the mobile scenario. In this paper, we propose a stronger Reciprocal Channel Variation-based Identification and classification (RCVIC) scheme for the mobile wireless networks, which exploits the reciprocity of the wireless fading channel and RSS variations naturally incurred by mobility to improve the detection performance. Different from current schemes only detect IBAs, RCVIC scheme conducts a multi-stage detection processes. If the IBAs are detected, RCVIC scheme partitions the received frames into two classes. The frames in the same class should be sent from the same senders, which could benefit the further analysis, such as network forensics, attacker localizing and trajectory analysis, etc. The feasibility of RCVIC are numerically evaluated through theoretical analysis and simulations. It is further validated through experiments using off-the-shelf 802.11 devices under different attacking patterns in real indoor and outdoor mobile scenarios.

Recently, MIMO (multiple-input-multiple-output) physical layer secure transmission has attracted great attentions. However, current schemes cannot defend against the passive eavesdroppers with arbitrary number of antennas. To address this problem, in this work, we propose a practical physical layer MIMO secure communication scheme (PLSC) to defend against such an eavesdropper with arbitrary number of antennas. In the proposed scheme, the transmitter first independently generates a random binary sequence as the “key bits (KB)” to “encrypt” (XOR) the confidential information. After that, the transmitter sends the “encrypted information” over the wireless channel, along with mapping key bits to the legitimate receiver simultaneously. The key principle lies in that the KB information is coded in the indexes of the activated/non-activated antennas combination of the legitimate user. Then, the legitimate receiver first observes his/her activated antenna indexes to obtain the corresponding key bits. After that, he/she demodulates the “encrypted information” at the activated antennas, and finally “decrypts” (XOR) the confidential information by using the observed key bits. However, due to the uniqueness and independence of MIMO wireless channel, for any other eavesdroppers who suffer an independent channel from legitimate users, we prove that it cannot observe any information about KB from the received signals, regardless of how many antennas it has used. Consequently, without knowledge of KB, it cannot decrypt any information about the confidential information, too. The reliability and security of PLSC are theoretically demonstrated. The simulation and numerical results fully verified the validity and effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

The cooperative physical layer security scheme can enhance the communication security of industrial wireless nodes that are computing and energy limitation, which provides the lightweight security for future industrial wireless networks (IWNs). By aiding an edge computing device, the optimal cooperative jamming (CJ) node can be selected, and employed to collaboratively transmit jamming signals to maximumly weaken the quality of the wiretap channel. For overcoming the drawback of the existing work that only studies the physical layer security in static scenes, a practical scenario where legitimate user and eavesdropper move randomly is considered in this article. The ergodic secrecy capacity with CJ in random mobile scenes is derived. An edge computing device is employed to make intelligent selection of an optimal cooperative node. Test and verification are carried out in the industrial factory. The test results show that the novel scheme can improve the secrecy of random mobile users in the IWNs.

Physical-layer security (PLS) in Internet of Things (IoT) has attracted great attentions recently. Although mobility is an intrinsic property of IoT networks, most of the existing works only investigate the secure transmission design for static users. To fill this gap, this article specifically investigates the secrecy throughput maximization problems for the mobile IoT user under two typical mobility models: 1) random waypoint model (RWP) and 2) random direction model (RD). The insights about how the mobility patterns, and security–reliability requirements affect the mobile user’s secrecy throughput are revealed. First, in order to establish the relationship between security and reliability of the mobile user, a general analytic framework is provided to derive the closed-form expressions of transmit secrecy outage probability (TSOP) for the mobile user. Second, two transmission schemes are proposed to maximize the secrecy throughput of the mobile user by ensuring a certain level of transmit probability (TP) and TSOP requirements. The numerical and simulation results verify the validity and effectiveness of the proposed schemes, and indicate that by adopting appropriate mobility pattern, the user’s secrecy throughput can be improved, and the constraint on its moving region can be largely reduced. Those properties are lightweight and feasible to enhance security for many mobile IoT scenarios.

Unlike most of the upper layer authentication mechanisms, the physical (PHY) layer authentication takes advantages of channel impulse response from wireless propagation to identify transmitted packages with low-resource consumption, and machine learning methods are effective ways to improve its implementation. However, the training of the machine-learning-based PHY-layer authentication requires a large number of training samples, which makes the training process time consuming and computationally resource intensive. In this article, we propose a data augmented multiuser PHY-layer authentication scheme to enhance the security of mobile-edge computing system, an emergent architecture in the Internet of Things (IoT). Three data augmentation algorithms are proposed to speed up the establishment of the authentication model and improve the authentication success rate. By combining the deep neural network with data augmentation methods, the performance of the proposed multiuser PHY-layer authentication scheme is improved and the training speed is accelerated, even with fewer training samples. Extensive simulations are conducted under the real industry IoT environment and the figures illustrate the effectiveness of our approach.

User mobility is a major feature of wireless networks. At present, physical layer security research rarely considers the impact of user mobility on the physical layer security performance in the network. In this study, the authors propose a random mobile user physical layer security model and study the impact of random waypoint movement users on the security performance of the physical layer in wireless networks, in which an artificial noise security scheme under the multi‐antenna transmission model is considered. They derive the closed expression of positive secrecy capacity probability and secrecy outage probability under this model. The results prove that system security is enhanced because of the users’ mobility.

In this study, the authors propose a simple and robust near‐optimal single differential coherent detection scheme for IEEE 802.15.4 binary phase shift keying (BPSK) receivers. The detection process is initiated by a bootstrap processor, which is responsible for estimating and compensating the residual carrier frequency offset effect in the sample from the autocorrelator output. In particular, for this bootstrap processor, a simple estimator with only one addition operation is provided. This low complexity benefits from that the high signal‐to‐noise ratio and a trigonometric approximation are combined, i.e. , for simplification of the full estimation scheme. Further, to achieve near optimal performance as well as robustness to carrier frequency offset, the observation space is subdivided into four equi‐angular regions to decrease the estimation error introduced by the involved approximation. The proposed method is validated through detailed physical layer (PHY) simulations according to the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. The simulation results demonstrate that, compared with the full estimator, the proposed algorithm can acquire a fairly accurate estimation, with almost no loss of reliability and robustness, whereas complexity reduction is also achieved.

Physical layer security of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems has attracted great attentions. However, the impact of mobility on physical layer security of NOMA systems has not been well studied. In this paper, to fill this gap, we investigate the impact of random mobility on physical layer security of NOMA systems. Considering scenarios where a base station (BS) or access point (AP) communicates to two random mobile users with a passive eavesdropper in two concentric circles, we study the secrecy performance with combinations of two typical random mobility models: random waypoint (RWP) and random direction (RD). A general analytical framework to numerically calculate the average secrecy rates of NOMA mobile users under steady state is provided. By comparing secrecy performance of mobile users with static users, we find that RWP mobile users can achieve higher average secrecy rates than the users with other mobility combinations. Meanwhile, two types of secrecy fairness for mobile users are fully considered and we propose a novel sum average secrecy rate maximization problem, subject to average power limits and users' QoS (quality of service) requirements. Considering eavesdropper's channel state information (CSI) is unknown to BS, we propose a threshold power allocation strategy to improve the sum average secrecy rate of NOMA mobile users. Extensive numerical simulations are conducted to validate our model and theoretical analysis.

Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming an emerging paradigm to achieve ubiquitous connectivity, via massive deployment of physical objects, such as sensors, controllers, and actuators. However, concerns on the IoT security are raised due to the wireless broadcasting nature and the energy constraint of the physical objects. In this paper, we study secure downlink transmission from a controller to an actuator, with the help of a cooperative jammer to fight against multiple passive and noncolluding eavesdroppers. In addition to artificial noise aided secrecy beamforming for secure transmission, cooperative jamming (CJ) is explored to further enhance physical layer security. In particular, we provide a secrecy enhancing transmit design to minimize the secrecy outage probability (SOP), subject to a minimum requirement on the secrecy rate. Based on a strict mathematical analysis, we further characterize the impacts of the main channel quality and the minimum secrecy rate on transmit designs. Numerical results confirm that our design can enhance both security (in terms of SOP) and power efficiency as compared with the approach without CJ.

Wireless physical layer security has attracted great attention in recent years. Although mobility is an intrinsic property of wireless networks, most of the existing works only consider static scenarios and the impact of mobility on wireless physical layer security is not well understood. To fill this gap, in this paper, we investigate physical layer security in the scenario with a random mobile receiver under Rayleigh fading channel. We consider a common scenario where a base station or access point communicates to a random mobile receiver with a passive eavesdropper in a circular region. The secrecy performances under three typical random mobility models are studied: random waypoint model (RWP); random direction model (RD); and border move model. We investigate the secrecy characteristics of the mobile user under steady-state running and provide a general analytical framework for computing the ergodic secrecy capacity. We derive tractable closed-form expressions of positive secrecy capacity probability and secrecy outage probability for RWP and RD mobility users, respectively. By comparing the secrecy performance of mobility with static case, we find that the RWP mobile user can achieve much better secrecy performance than the others. We then investigate the secrecy performance of RWP mobile user with pause time. Furthermore, the two types of secrecy improvement strategies for random mobile users are proposed. In the first strategy, a transmit subcell for RWP users is bounded. We allow the transmitter to communicate with the mobile user only when he is moving within the subcell. In the other strategy, the transmitter is turned on only when the evaluated secrecy performance reaches to a required level. We strike a good trade-off between the secrecy improvements and transmit outage probability. Extensive simulation results validate our theoretical analysis. Finally, we extend our framework to other realistic scenarios, including nodes moving in other shapes of areas, and multiple non-cooperative and cooperative eavesdroppers.

In this paper, we investigate cooperative security in wireless networks, where a source (Alice) intends to transmit a confidential message to a legitimate destination (Bob), with the help of a cooperative node (Charlie), in the presence of multiple independent eavesdroppers (Eves). In particular, cooperative jamming (CJ) is explored to enhance secure communication between Alice and Bob. We provide a transmit design to maximize the secrecy rate, subject to a secrecy outage probability (SOP) constraint. Specifically, we establish a condition under which positive secrecy rate can be guaranteed. In addition to secrecy rate performance, we also pay attention to the secure energy efficiency, defined as the ratio of secrecy rate to total power consumption. Numerical results validate the effectiveness and energy efficiency of our proposed CJ scheme.

For current MIMO physical layer security, most of the existing works study how to increase the secrecy capacity. However, the unconditional secure transmission fully achieving the secrecy capacity is difficult to realize, because the theoretical capacity can be achieved only by a wiretap code with infinite blocklength [1]. In most cases, the long codelength secure code is needed to approach the secrecy capacity [14]. Even though the short blocklengh code is prospective for timely and lower burden communication networks, not much exploration has been done to fulfil the unconditional security by a short length wiretap code. In this work, we investigate a lightweight strategy to achieve unconditional secrecy for the practical MIMO Beamforming artifacial noise (MIMO-BAN) physical layer security system under short blocklength wiretap code. Firstly, we analyse the modulated impact on MIMO-BAN secrecy capacity. Then we investigate the achievable secrecy performance for MIMO-BAN physical layer secure system under practical short blocklengh secure code. Based on this, we propose a light wight secrecy strategy, which could guarantee required quality of the main channel while keeping eavesdropper's BER approaching to 0.5. The simulation results verify our analytical performance predictions and demonstrate its feasibility.

Many approaches to build a wiretap channel (WTC) by multi‐input multi‐output system have been introduced. Different from those approaches, the authors propose a feedback method combined with the low‐density parity‐check (LDPC) codes for building the WTC I (WTC‐I) to achieve unconditional security under single‐input single‐output system by the soft decision decoding. The novel approach establishes the WTC‐I on both the binary symmetric channel and binary input additive white Gaussian noise channel. In order to keep the eavesdropper be fully ignorant about the secret information, randomness is added to the feedback signals from the destination by taking advantage of feedback. In addition, the message to be sent is encoded by the LDPC codes such that it can be correctly decoded by a legitimate receiver. Furthermore, the secret information transmission capacity can be improved by the soft decision decoding.

In this paper, we consider physical layer security in wireless communication networks in which a source (Alice) intends to send a confidential message to a legitimate destination (Bob) with the help of a cooperative jammer (CJ), in the presence of a passive eavesdropper (Eve). Assuming that only statistical channel state information (CSI) of Eve is available, artificial-noise (AN) assisted beamforming and cooperative jamming are designed. The goal is to maximize the secrecy rate, subject to a constraint on secrecy outage probability. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of our scheme. Moreover, a higher secure energy efficiency (EE) can be achieved as compared with other schemes without a cooperative jammer.

This study investigates the framework of associating multiple‐input–multiple‐output (MIMO) beamforming with secure code to achieve unconditional secure communications in the wireless passive eavesdropping environment. The schemes are based on a two‐step method under Wyner's wiretap channel model. First, with MIMO transmit beamforming, one can utilise the spatial degree of freedom to cripple eavesdroppers’ interceptions even when he does not know the eavesdropper's channel state information. Consequently, by taking the threshold characteristics of the secure code, the legitimate receivers will continue to extend an average bit error rate advantage over eavesdroppers when they share similar conditions (background noise power and channel gains). By this way, the proposed system could achieve almost zero information obtained by the eavesdroppers while still keeping rather lower error transmissions for the main channel. A profound theoretical analysis for the MIMO advantage channel and the exact closed‐form expressions of secrecy outage probability for the secure code joint system are presented. The authors launch extensive experiments to verify the proposed security systems and demonstrate its feasibility and implement ability.