Individual Secrecy Research Articles

Secrecy Performance for Full-Duplex Jamming-Aided Uplink NOMA System

Full duplex (FD) is one of the most attractive technologies in enhancing spectral efficiency for potentially doubling the system throughput. In this work, we employ FD jamming to improve the secrecy performance of an uplink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system at the presence of one eavesdropper. We first evaluate the individual secrecy performance in terms of effective secrecy throughput (EST), by deriving its closed-form expression. Valuable insights are provided into the impacts of transmit power, jamming power as well as the number of antennas. Asymptotic analyses concerning these three arguments show the secrecy performance is location-dependent only in the high regime of transmit power and approaches to the main capacity in the high regime of the other two arguments. A special case, beamforming FD jamming, is next studied such that <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$N$</tex-math></inline-formula> -fold power gain on jamming is available, in turn, improving the secrecy performance. Limited gains from high transmit and jamming power prompt us to further investigate two optimal power allocation problems: (1) optimal power allocation to minimize total power, subject to an overall secrecy performance requirement; (2) optimal power allocation to maximize overall secrecy performance, with constraint of total power. The solutions to these two optimization problems are given and demonstrated numerically with appropriate cases.

Privacy preserving association rule hiding using border based approach

&lt;div&gt;Association rule mining is a well-known data mining technique used for extracting hidden correlations between data items in large databases. In the majority of the situations, data mining results contain sensitive information about individuals and publishing such data will violate individual secrecy. The challenge of association rule mining is to preserve the confidentiality of sensitive rules when releasing the database to external parties. The association rule hiding technique conceals the knowledge extracted by the sensitive association rules by modifying the database. In this paper, we introduce a border-based algorithm for hiding sensitive association rules. The main purpose of this approach is to conceal the sensitive rule set while maintaining the utility of the database and association rule mining results at the highest level. The performance of the algorithm in terms of the side effects is demonstrated using experiments conducted on two real datasets. The results show that the information loss is minimized without sacrificing the accuracy. &lt;/div&gt;

Network Coding-Based Post-Quantum Cryptography

We propose a novel hybrid universal network-coding cryptosystem (HUNCC) to obtain secure post-quantum cryptography at high communication rates. The secure network-coding scheme we offer is hybrid in the sense that it combines information-theoretic security with public-key cryptography. In addition, the scheme is general and can be applied to any communication network, and to any public-key cryptosystem. Our hybrid scheme is based on the information theoretic notion of individual secrecy, which traditionally relies on the assumption that an eavesdropper can only observe a subset of the communication links between the trusted parties - an assumption that is often challenging to enforce. For this setting, several code constructions have been developed, where the messages are linearly mixed before transmission over each of the paths in a way that guarantees that an adversary which observes only a subset has sufficient uncertainty about each individual message. Instead, in this article, we take a computational viewpoint, and construct a coding scheme in which an arbitrary secure cryptosystem is utilized on a subset of the links, while a pre-processing similar to the one in individual security is utilized. Under this scheme, we demonstrate 1) a computational security guarantee for an adversary which observes the entirety of the links 2) an information theoretic security guarantee for an adversary which observes a subset of the links, and 3) information rates which approach the capacity of the network and greatly improve upon the current solutions. A perhaps surprising consequence of our scheme is that, to guarantee a computational security level b, it is sufficient to encrypt a single link using a computational post-quantum scheme. That is, using HUNCC, we can ensure post-quantum security in networks where it is not possible to use public-key encryption over all the links in the network. In addition, the information rate approaches 1 as the number of communication links increases. As a concrete example, in a multipath network with three links, using a 128-bit computationally secure McEliece cryptosystem only over one link, we obtain a 128-bit individually computationally secure level over all paths with a total information rate of 0.91 in the network.

Secrecy Analysis for Full-Duplex Jamming-Aided Uplink NOMA System

Full duplex (FD) is one of the most attractive technologies in enhancing spectrum efficiency for potentially doubling the system throughput. In this work, we employ FD jamming to improve the secrecy performance of an uplink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system at the presence of one eavesdropper. We first characterize the individual secrecy performance in terms of effective secrecy throughput (EST), and derive its closed-form expression via secrecy outage probability (SOP). We then further investigate the problem of optimal power allocation to maximize overall secrecy performance. The solution to the optimization problem is figured out and demonstrated numerically with an appropriate case.

Jamming-Aided Secrecy Performance in Secure Uplink NOMA System

A novel secrecy scenario of uplink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) along with cooperative jammer(s) to improve secrecy performance is studied in this work. We first characterize secrecy performance in terms of positive secrecy rate probability, secrecy outage probability (SOP) and effective secrecy throughput (EST), and derive the closed-expressions of individual secrecy performance. The analytical results not only show an improvement on secrecy performance with the aid of cooperative jamming, but also clearly illustrate how each jammer affects the secrecy performance. We then continue the study of the individual secrecy performance for its asymptotic behaviors, and reveal it is only dependent on its relative distance to the eavesdropper over the desired receiver in a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. Finally, the maximization of overall secrecy performance is covered by investigating two optimization problems: 1) optimal selection of jammer(s) under the same transmit power; 2) optimal power allocation to each transmitter, including jammers, under the constraint of limited total transmit power. The solutions to these two problems are presented and demonstrated by an appropriate case.

Estimation Theoretic Optimal Encoding Design for Secure Transmission of Multiple Parameters

In this paper, optimal deterministic encoding of a vector parameter is investigated in the presence of an eavesdropper. The objective is to minimize the expectation of the conditional Cramer–Rao bound at the intended receiver, while satisfying an individual secrecy constraint on the mean-squared error of estimating each parameter at the eavesdropper. The eavesdropper is modeled to employ the linear minimum mean-squared error estimator based on the noisy observation of the encoded parameter without being aware of encoding. First, the problem is formulated as a constrained optimization problem in the space of vector-valued functions. Then, two practical solution strategies are developed based on nonlinear individual encoding and affine joint encoding of parameters. Theoretical results on the solutions of the proposed strategies are provided for various scenarios on channel conditions and parameter distributions. Finally, numerical examples are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed solution approaches.

Secrecy outage analysis of energy harvesting two‐way relaying networks with friendly jammer

This study investigates two-way relaying where an energy harvesting capable relay exchanges information between two sources. Legitimate information is wire-tapped by an eavesdropper. To intercept wire-tapping, this study exploits a friendly jammer. Secrecy outage analysis of the energy harvesting two-way relaying network with the friendly jammer over Rayleigh fading channels is first proposed in terms of individual secrecy outage probabilities and then validated by computer simulations. Various results demonstrate the efficacy of the jammer in preventing the eavesdropper from stealing the source information and significant impacts of relay location, jammer location, jammer's transmit power, energy conversion efficiency, time switching ratio on the security performance.

Vulnerabilities of Massive MIMO Systems to Pilot Contamination Attacks

We consider a single-cell massive MIMO system in which a base station (BS) with a large number of antennas transmits simultaneously to several single-antenna users in the presence of an attacker.The BS acquires the channel state information (CSI) based on uplink pilot transmissions. In this work, we demonstrate the vulnerability of CSI estimation phase to malicious attacks. For that purpose, we study two attack models. In the first model, the attacker aims at minimizing the sum-rate of downlink transmissions by contaminating the uplink pilots. In the second model, the attacker exploits its in-band full-duplex capabilities to generate jamming signals in both the CSI estimation and data transmission phases. We study these attacks under two downlink power allocation strategies when the attacker knows and does not know the locations of the BS and users. The formulated problems are solved using stochastic optimization, Lagrangian minimization, and game-theoretic methods. A closed-form solution for a special case of the problem is obtained. Furthermore, we analyze the achievable individual secrecy rates under a pilot contamination attack, and provide an upper bound on these rates. Our results indicate that the proposed attacks degrade the throughput of a massive MIMO system by more than half.

Secrecy Energy Efficiency Optimization for Downlink Two-User OFDMA Networks With SWIPT

Simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT), as a promising technology by which mobile devices are designed by both information decoding and energy harvesting at the same time, has recently drawn significant interests. However, in multiuser scenario, a challenging physical layer security issue arises as the confident messages sent to the intended information receivers may be eavesdropped by other receivers. To address this problem, in this paper, secrecy energy efficiency maximization (SEEM) problem is investigated for two-user orthogonal frequency-division multiple access networks with SWIPT. Specifically, a power splitting scheme is adopted for each user, which would split received radio frequency signals into two independent parts for information decoding and energy harvesting, respectively. Taking both the individual secrecy quality of service requirement and the individual harvested energy constraint into consideration, the SEEM problem is formulated as a nonlinear fractional programming problem. Moreover, according to Dinkelbach's method, a power allocation and power splitting (PAPS) algorithm is proposed by solving the equivalent convex optimization problem. Finally, numerical results verify the impact of static circuit power consumption, maximum transmit power, power split ratio, subcarrier bandwidth, and path loss on secrecy energy efficiency of our PAPS algorithm.

Secure Wireless Information and Power Transfer Based on Tilt Adaptation in 3-D Massive MIMO Systems

In this paper, we investigate a secure transmission algorithm exploiting the vertical domain for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) in a massive multiple-input multiple-output system over Rician fading channels. Each user adopts the power splitting (PS) technique to separate information and energy, which is regarded as a potential eavesdropper (ED) for the intended user. We consider the scenario, where at least one ED has the same angle of departure with the intended user. The base station (BS) applies artificial noise (AN) and deploys 3-D directional antennas to enhance the secure rate and energy transfer by adjusting the antenna tilt adaptively. We first derive the approximate ergodic achievable secrecy rate and harvested power. Based on these approximations, the optimization problem is formulated to minimize the total transmit power with individual secrecy rate and harvested power targets. We propose an iterative algorithm to jointly optimizing the BS antenna tilt, AN covariance, power allocation, and PS ratios. The numerical results verify that the approximate secrecy rate is very close to the actual values and show that the performance of the proposal approaches that of the optimal solutions from the brute-force search and outperforms the 2-D and conventional 3-D schemes, which proves the significant role of tilt adaptation in the secure SWIPT.

Maximizing Secrecy Capacity of Underlay MIMO-CRN Through Bi-Directional Zero-Forcing Beamforming

This paper presents the optimal physical-layer security scheme of both primary user (PU) and secondary user (SU) in the underlay multiple-input multiple-output cognitive-radio network (MIMO-CRN) by use of a bi-directional zero-forcing beamformer. The proposed new method enables the PU to communicate along with the SUs through a relay node without sacrificing their individual secrecy capacity, i.e., without causing interference to each other even in the presence of eavesdropper(s). In the first phase, a transmitting beamformer at the PU/SU transmitters and a receiving beamformer at the relay have been adopted to separate PU and SU data. In the second phase, a bi-directional beamformer has been applied to eradicate the necessity of involving artificial noise for preventing the active eavesdropper(s). To maximize the total secrecy capacity, a generalized non-linear optimization problem has been formulated and converted to a simplified constrained optimization problem by utilizing the beamformer and the associated subspace restriction. Then, this problem is solved by the Lagrangian method. Both theoretical and numerical analyses of the total and individual ergodic secrecy rates are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. The secrecy outage probability is also derived to evaluate the performance variations of our proposed scheme when the channel-estimation error occurs.

Secrets and Lies: The Proliferation of State Surveillance Capabilities and the Legislative Secrecy Which Fortifies Them – An Activist's Account

As new technologies upend traditional power structures grounded in an information asymmetry between the state and its populace, governments are finding new ways to entrench state secrecy and inhibit individual secrecy. The global migration of everyday activities to the online realm is being met by surveillance technologies and techniques which have turned the Internet into a virtual panopticon. As states seek to legitimize the extension of surveillance into almost every realm of public and private lives, they are constructing legal frameworks that embed technical capabilities in layers of secrecy and opacity, rolling back hard-won legal protections and removing surveillance from the jurisdiction of accountability and redress mechanisms. This article focuses on the multiple layers of human rights violations inflicted by modern state spycraft. First, the inhibition of the enjoyment of rights such as privacy, free association, speech and opinion, and second, the deprivation of citizens from access to information, redress and the ability to engage in legislative and democratic debates on an even playing field.

Individual secrecy of fading homogeneous multiple access wiretap channel with successive interference cancellation

We investigate individual secrecy performance in a K-user quasi-static Rayleigh fading homogeneous multiple access wiretap channel (MAC-WT), where a legitimate receiver employs successive interference cancellation (SIC) decoding. We first evaluate individual secrecy performance under an arbitrary SIC order by deriving closed-form expressions with respect to secrecy outage probability and effective secrecy throughput (EST) as main metrics. The resulting closed-form expressions disclose a significant impact on the secrecy performance from the order of SIC decoding. Therefore, we propose three SIC decoding order scheduling schemes: (1) round-robin scheme, absolutely fair and served as a benchmark; (2) suboptimal scheme, based on each user’s main channel condition; and (3) optimal scheme, based on each user’s achievable secrecy rate. Comparison results show that the last two schemes outperform the first one with regard to both the EST and the multi-user diversity gain, whereas the performance of the suboptimal scheme is highly close to that of the optimal scheme which is usually impractical due to a requirement for the eavesdropper’s channel state information (CSI).

Individual Secrecy for Broadcast Channels With Receiver Side Information

This paper studies the problem of secure communication over the broadcast channel with receiver side information under the lens of individual secrecy constraints. That is, the transmitter wants to send two independent messages to two receivers which have, respectively, the desired message of the other receiver as side information, while keeping the eavesdropper ignorant of each message (i.e., the information leakage from each message to the eavesdropper is made vanishing). Building upon one-time pad, secrecy coding, and broadcasting schemes, achievable rate regions are investigated, and the capacity region for special cases of either a weak or strong eavesdropper (compared to both legitimate receivers) are characterized. Interestingly, the capacity region for the former corresponds to a line and the latter corresponds to a square with missing corners; a phenomenon occurring due to the coupling between user's rates. Moreover, the individual secrecy capacity region is also fully characterized for the case where the eavesdropper's channel is deterministic. In addition to discrete memoryless setup, Gaussian scenarios are studied. For the Gaussian model, in addition to the strong and weak eavesdropper cases, the capacity region is characterized for the low and high SNR regimes when the eavesdropper's channel is stronger than one receiver but weaker than the other. Remarkably, positive secure transmission rates are always guaranteed under the individual secrecy constraint, unlike the case of the joint secrecy constraint (i.e., the information leakage from both messages to the eavesdropper is made vanishing). Thus, this notion of secrecy serves as an appropriate candidate for trading off secrecy level and transmission rate; making secrecy more affordable but still acceptable to the end user.

Exploiting Full-Duplex Receivers for Achieving Secret Communications in Multiuser MISO Networks

We consider a broadcast channel in which a multi-antenna transmitter (Alice) sends K confidential information signals to K legitimate users (Bobs) in the presence of L eavesdroppers (Eves). Alice uses multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) precoding to generate the information signals along with her own (Tx-based) friendly jamming (FJ). Interference at each Bob is removed by MIMO zero-forcing. This, however, leaves a “vulnerability region” around each Bob, which can be exploited by a nearby Eve. We address this problem by augmenting Tx-based FJ (TxFJ) with Rx-based FJ (RxFJ), generated by each Bob. Specifically, each Bob uses self-interference suppression to transmit a friendly jamming signal, while simultaneously receiving an information signal over the same channel. We minimize the powers allocated to the information, TxFJ, and RxFJ signals under given guarantees on the individual secrecy rate for each Bob. The problem is solved for the cases when the eavesdropper's channel state information is known/unknown. Simulations show the effectiveness of the proposed solution. Furthermore, we discuss how to schedule transmissions when the rate requirements need to be satisfied on average rather than instantaneously. Under special cases, a scheduling algorithm that serves only the strongest receivers is shown to outperform the one that schedules all receivers.

Individual Secrecy for the Broadcast Channel

This paper studies the problem of secure communications over broadcast channels under the individual secrecy constraints. That is, the transmitter wants to send two independent messages to two legitimate receivers in the presence of an eavesdropper, while keeping the eavesdropper ignorant of each message (i.e., the information leakage rate from each message to the eavesdropper is made vanishing). Building upon Carleial–Hellman’s secrecy coding, Wyner’s secrecy coding, and the framework of Marton’s coding together with techniques, such as rate splitting and indirect decoding, an achievable individual secrecy rate region is established with the characterization of capacity regions for some special cases. In particular, the individual secrecy capacity region for the linear deterministic model is fully characterized, and for the Gaussian model, a constant gap (i.e., 0.5 b within the individual secrecy capacity region) result is obtained. To illustrate the impact of different secrecy constraints on the corresponding capacity regions, comparisons are made with those satisfying joint secrecy and without secrecy constraints. Overall, when compared with the joint secrecy constraint, the results allow for trading off secrecy level and throughput in the system.

ZF-SIC Based Individual Secrecy in SIMO Multiple Access Wiretap Channel

In this paper, a decoding method of joint zero-forcing and successive interference cancellation (ZF-SIC) is put forward to assist the study of the individual secrecy in the quasi-static Rayleigh fading single-input multiple-output multiple access wiretap channel. We first evaluate the individual secrecy performance by deriving the closed-form expressions in terms of positive secrecy capacity probability, secrecy outage probability, and effective secrecy throughput (EST). Besides the expected impact of the SIC order, we find, in high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, the secrecy performance is only determined by the transmitter’s relative distance to eavesdropper over legitimate receiver rather than the SNR. Such a result prompts us to propose an SIC order scheduling scheme (alternative scheme) on basis of the transmitters’ relative distances from the shortest to the longest. It is proved optimal in achieving total maximum EST in high SNR regime. Finally, we also investigate the problem of optimal power allocation to each transmitter under the constraint of the limited total power. An interesting solution to this problem is disclosed with the aid of numerical analysis.

Secure Beamforming Design for SWIPT in MISO Broadcast Channel With Confidential Messages and External Eavesdroppers

This paper studies the secure beamforming design for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer in a multiple-input single-output broadcast channel with confidential messages and external eavesdroppers, where each receiver adopts the power splitting (PS) scheme to decode information and harvest energy concurrently, and it is also seen as a potential eavesdropper for messages not intended for it. Our objective is to minimize the total transmit power while guaranteeing the individual secrecy rate and energy harvesting constraints at each receiver by jointly optimizing transmit beamforming vectors, artificial noise covariance, and receive PS ratios. Both scenarios of perfect and imperfect channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter are considered. For the perfect CSI case, we propose a two-stage optimization approach to solve the original non-convex problem global optimality, and also provide a low-complexity suboptimal solution based on the particle swarm optimization algorithm. Furthermore, we also extend the above result to the colluding eavesdroppers scenario. For the imperfect CSI case, we propose a worst-case-based robust formulation, where the CSI errors are norm-bounded. With the aid of S-Procedure, we derive the equivalent forms for constraints and then transform the non-convex robust design into a convex optimization problem. Simulation results are finally presented to demonstrate the performance of our proposed schemes.

On the Individual Secrecy Capacity Regions of the General, Degraded, and Gaussian Multi-Receiver Wiretap Broadcast Channel

In this paper, secure communication over a broadcast channel with multiple legitimate receivers and an external eavesdropper is investigated. Two different secrecy measures are considered. The first criterion is a conservative one known as joint secrecy, where the mutual leakage of all confidential messages must be small. The second criterion is a less conservative constraint known as individual secrecy, where the individual leakage of each confidential message must be small. At first, we consider the degraded multi-receiver wiretap broadcast channel and manage to establish the individual secrecy capacity region. Our encoding scheme applies a careful combination of the standard techniques of wiretap random coding and Shannon's one time pad encoding, where the confidential messages of the weak receivers are used as secret keys for the stronger ones. The validity of this technique is due to the properties of the degraded broadcast channel and the secrecy requirements of the individual secrecy criterion. Our result indicates that the individual secrecy capacity region is in fact larger than the joint one established in earlier literature. The established capacity region is then used to derive the individual secrecy capacity regions of the Gaussian single-input single-output and degraded Gaussian multiple-input multiple-output multi-receiver wiretap broadcast channels. Furthermore, we present an achievable rate region for the general two-receiver wiretap broadcast channel under both the joint and the individual secrecy criterion. Comparing these two rate regions suggests that even for the general case, the individual secrecy criterion might be able to provide a larger rate region compared with the joint one.

Secure communication design for multi‐user peer‐to‐peer wireless relay networks

In this study, physical layer security techniques are studied for multi-user peer-to-peer relay networks using amplify-and-forward protocol in the presence of an eavesdropper. Two system designs are considered: the minimum achievable secrecy rate maximisation and the total transmit power minimisation. First, considering user fairness, the authors study the max–min achievable secrecy rate problem subject to a total transmit power constraint. Mathematically, the optimisation problem is non-linear and non-convex. They propose a polynomial time algorithm based on the bisection technique to solve it. Second, they study the total transmit power minimisation problem which aims at minimising the total transmit power at relays such that individual secrecy rate for each user is satisfied. The total power optimisation problem is also non-convex, so they use the relaxation technique to transform it into a convex problem which can be efficiently solved by the gradient-based algorithms. Numerical evaluation of the obtained secrecy rate and transmit power results shows that the proposed designs can significantly improve the performance of secure wireless communications.