A Practical Implementation of Physical Layer Security in Wireless Networks

Abstract

Physical Layer Security (PLS) is widely recognized as a promising approach to secure wireless communications through the exploitation of the physical properties of the wireless channel. However, until today, PLS has mostly been a concept from information theory without practical implementations. In this paper, we present an actual implementation of PLS in a wireless network. We achieved this by leveraging the flexibility and control granularity offered by the relatively new concept of spectrum programming, by which we were able to control and degrade the quality of the eavesdropper’s channel by virtually manipulating the connectivity of the legitimate station. The key feature of our design is that we make intelligent use of the architecture of a wireless network instead of trying to control every link individually on the physical layer. The PLS implementation is built using off-the-shelf hardware and open-source software which makes it cost-effective and easy to replicate.