Physical Layer Approaches For Securing Wireless Communication Systems

This book surveys the outstanding work of physical-layer (PHY) security, including the recent achievements of confidentiality and authentication for wireless communication systems by channel identification. A practical approach to building unconditional confidentiality for Wireless Communication security by feedback and error correcting code is introduced and a framework of PHY security based on space time block code (STBC) MIMO system is demonstrated. Also discussed is a scheme which combines cryptographic techniques implemented in the higher layer with the physical layer security approach using redundant antennas of MIMO systems to provide stronger security for wireless networks. The channel responses between communication peers have been explored as a form of fingerprint with spatial and temporal uniqueness. Finally, the book develops a new lightweight method of channel identification for Sybil attack and node clone detection in wireless sensor networks (WSNs).

This book focuses specifically on physical layer security, a burgeoning topic in security. It consists of contributions from the leading research groups in this emerging area, and for the first time important high-impact results are collected together.

Physical layer security has recently become an emerging technique to complement and significantly improve the communication security of wireless networks. Compared to cryptographic approaches, physical layer security is a fundamentally different paradigm where secrecy is achieved by exploiting the physical layer properties of the communication syst

Securing Emerging Wireless Systems: Lower-layer Approaches aims to fill a growing need in the research community for a reference that describes the lower-layer approaches as a foundation towards secure and reliable wireless systems. Whereas most of the references typically address cryptographic attacks by using conventional "network security" approches for securing wireless systems, the proposed book will be differentiated from the rest of the market by its focus on non-cryptographic attacks that cannot easily be addressed by using traditional methods, and further by presenting a collection of defense mechanisms that operate at the lower-layers of the protocol stack and can defend wireless systems before the effects of attacks propagate up to higher-level applications and services. The book will focus on fundamental security problems that involve properties unique to wireless systems, such as the characteristics of radio propagation, or the location of communicating entities, or the properties of the medium access control layer. Specifically, the book provides detection mechanisms and highlights defense strategies that cope with threats to wireless localization infrastructure, attacks on wireless networks that exploit entity identity (i.e. spoofing attacks), jamming and radio interference that can undermine the availability of wireless communications, and privacy threats where an adversary seeks to infer spatial and temporal contextual information surrounding wireless communications. Additionally, the authors explore new paradigms of physical layer security for wireless systems, which can support authentication and confidentiality services by exploiting fading properties unique to wireless communications.

This book introduces various signal processing approaches to enhance physical layer secrecy in multi-antenna wireless systems. Wireless physical layer secrecy has attracted much attention in recent years due to the broadcast nature of the wireless medium and its inherent vulnerability to eavesdropping. While most articles on physical layer secrecy focus on the information-theoretic aspect, we focus specifically on the signal processing aspects, including beamforming and precoding techniques for data transmission and discriminatory training schemes for channel estimation. The discussions will cover cases with collocated and with distributed antennas, i.e., relays. The topics covered will be of interest to researchers in the signal processing community as well to practitioners and engineers working in this area. This book will also review recent works that apply these signal processing approaches to more advanced wireless systems, such as OFDM systems, multicell systems, cognitive radio, multihop networks etc. This will draw interest from researchers that wish to pursue the topic further in these new directions. This book is divided into three parts: (i) data transmission, (ii) channel estimation and (iii) advanced applications. Even though many works exist in the literature on these topics, the approaches and perspectives taken were largely diverse. This book provides a more organized and systematic view of these designs and to lay a solid foundation for future work in these areas. Moreover, by presenting the work from a signal processing perspective, this book will also trigger more research interest from the signal processing community and further advance the field of physical layer secrecy along the described directions. This book allows readers to gain basic understanding of works on physical layer secrecy, knowledge of how signal processing techniques can be applied to this area, and the application of these techniques in advanced wireless applications.