Secrecy Loss in Diffusive Molecular Timing Channels

Abstract

This paper uses a secrecy performance metric to analyze and evaluate the secrecy performance of multi-particle diffusive molecular timing (DMT) channels. Using the existing upper bound expression on the channel capacity, we evaluate the secrecy outage probability (SOP) expression when the particles received by Eve are assumed to be Gaussian distributed. Using the SOP expression, we then calculate the average secrecy rate (ASR) of the system. We further use the SOP and ASR expressions to obtain the amount of secrecy loss (ASL) expression in the multi-particle DMT channels. The ASL expression gives insight into the severity of information loss in the molecular communication (MC) environment in Eve’s presence. Specifically, the ASL metric compared to SOP and ASR is a better alternative to analyze Eve’s effect in the DMT channels. Finally, numerical results give useful insights into the secrecy performance of the system.