A stealthy artificial noise strategy against eavesdropping for remote estimation sensor networks

Abstract

In this paper, the secure transmission issue of a remote estimation sensor network against eavesdropping is studied. A powerful eavesdropper overhears the measurement data sent through the communication channels between the sensors and the remote estimator, and estimates system state illegally, which threatens the system information security. Different from the existing anti-eavesdropping design approaches, a stealthy artificial noise (AN) strategy is proposed to prevent eavesdroppers from deciphering encryption policy by hiding the encryption process from eavesdroppers. It has the same dynamical process with each sensor’s measurement to guarantee that the estimation error of the eavesdropper is unbounded while its observation residual variance keeps in certain bound and converges to 0, and further ensure system security without alerting the eavesdropper. It is proved that the strategy is feasible whenever the eavesdropper starts to wiretap. The selection of sensors that needs to be encrypted is further given by solving an optimization problem. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is verified by two simulation examples.