Signalling and Resource Allocation for Secure Communication in Gaussian Wireless Channels

Abstract

Gaussian wireless channels are studied under two forms of security attacks: (i) the jamming attack, where the adversary is active and transmits corruptive signal, but is not interested in the content of the communication, (ii) the eavesdropping attack, where the adversary is passive and overhears the communication and tries to obtain the message that has been transmitted.

The active attack is studied in a multi-user setting. The behavior of two users and one jammer in an additive white Gaussian channel (AWGN) with and without fading is investigated, when they participate in a non-cooperative zero-sum game, with the channel's input/output mutual information as the objective function. We assume that the jammer can eavesdrop the channel and can use the information obtained to perform correlated jamming. We also differentiate between the availability of perfect and noisy information about the user signals at the jammer. Under various assumptions on the channel characteristics, and the extent of channel state information available at the users and the jammer, we show the existence, or otherwise non-existence of a simultaneously optimal set of strategies for the users and the jammer, and characterize those strategies whenever they exist.

For the passive eavesdropping attack, we study multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) AWGN channels. We first consider a multiple-input single-output (MISO) channel, where the transmitter has multiple antennas, while the receiver and the eavesdropper have single antennas each. We find achievable rates for this channel. With the channel input restricted to Gaussian signalling with no pre-processing of information, optimal transmission strategies that maximize the achievable secrecy rates are found, in terms of the input covariance matrices. It is shown that, under the optimal communication strategy, the system reduces to a single-input single-output (SISO) channel. We then extend the achievability results to fading Gaussian MISO channels. Finally, as a step toward generalizing the problem to one with multiple antennas at the receiver, we discuss the Gaussian 2-2-1 channel with a transmitter and a receiver with two antennas each, and a single antenna eavesdropper. We develop an achievability scheme similar to those of the SISO and MISO channels, and further show that in fact, it achieves the secrecy capacity of this 2-2-1 channel.