Physical Layer Security for Channels with State and Active Eavesdroppers (PLAY SCATE)

• Applicants: Professor Dr.-Ing. Holger Boche; Professor Dr.-Ing. Eduard Axel Jorswieck
• Subject Area: Electronic Semiconductors, Components and Circuits, Integrated Systems, Sensor Technology, Theoretical Electrical Engineering
• Term: from 2016 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 326920355

• Final Report Year: 2024

Final Report Abstract

In current communication systems, there is usually an architectural separation between error correction and data encryption. The former is typically realized at the physical layer, transforming the noisy communication channel into a reliable ”bit pipe”. The data encryption is implemented on top of that by applying cryptographic principles. A drawback of this approach is that it relies on the assumption of insufficient computational capabilities of non-legitimate receivers, resulting in so-called conditional security. Within post-quantum security, information theoretic approaches to security are intensively discussed as a complement to such cryptographic techniques. Such approaches jointly establish reliable communication and data confidentiality at the physical layer by taking the properties of the noisy channel into account. This approach has been identified by operators and national agencies as a key technique to secure future communication systems and it is currently discussed for 6G. In practical systems, Channel State Information (CSI) will always be limited due to the nature of the wireless channel and estimation/feedback inaccuracy. In order to design wireless systems resilient against failures caused by nature (fading, noise, etc.) and robust against malicious attacks, the correct system-theoretic model is the Compound Channel (CC) and the Arbitrarily Varying Channel (AVC) model, respectively. In this project, we worked to understand the fundamental properties of Compound Wiretap Channels (CWCs) and Arbitrarily Varying Wiretap Channels (AVWCs) with active eavesdroppers who voluntarily influence the channel states. For the system design it is important to consider constraints on the transmit as well as attacker nodes to correctly model their possibilities. We investigate the AVWC with non-causal side information at the jammer for the case that there exists a best channel to the eavesdropper. Non-causal side information means that the transmitted codeword is known to an active adversary before it is transmitted. A single-letter formula for the Common Randomness (CR)-assisted secrecy capacity is derived. Additionally, we provide a formula for the CR-assisted secrecy capacity for the cases where the channel to the eavesdropper is strongly degraded, strongly noisier, or strongly less capable with respect to the main channel. Furthermore, we compare our results to the CR-assisted secrecy capacity for the cases of maximum error criterion but without non-causal side information at the jammer (blind adversary), maximum error criterion with non-causal side information of the messages at the jammer (semi-blind adversary), and the case of average error criterion without non-causal side information at the jammer (blind adversary).

Publications

• Copulas and Multi-User Channel Orders. ICC 2019 - 2019 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), 1-6. IEEE.
  Lin, Pin-Hsun; Jorswieck, Eduard A.; Schaefer, Rafael F.; Janda, Carsten R. & Mittelbach, Martin
  
• Message Transmission Over Classical Quantum Channels With a Jammer With Side Information: Message Transmission Capacity and Resources. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 65(5), 2922-2943.
  Boche, Holger; Cai, Minglai & Cai, Ning
  
• Arbitrarily Varying Wiretap Channels with and without Non-Causal Side Information at the Jammer. 2020 IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS), 1-6. IEEE.
  Janda, Carsten Rudolf; Jorswieck, Eduard A.; Wiese, Moritz & Boche, Holger
  
• Arbitrarily Varying Wiretap Channels with Non-Causal Side Information at the Jammer. 2020 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), 938-943. IEEE.
  Janda, Carsten Rudolf; Jorswieck, Eduard A.; Wiese, Moritz & Boche, Holger
  
• Message transmission over classical quantum channels with a jammer with side information: Correlation as resource, common randomness generation. Journal of Mathematical Physics, 61(6).
  Boche, Holger; Cai, Minglai & Cai, Ning
  
• New Capacity Results for Fading Gaussian Multiuser Channels With Statistical CSIT. IEEE Transactions on Communications, 68(11), 6761-6774.
  Lin, Pin-Hsun; Jorswieck, Eduard A.; Schaefer, Rafael F.; Mittelbach, Martin & Janda, Carsten R.
  
• Semantic Security via Seeded Modular Coding Schemes and Ramanujan Graphs. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 67(1), 52-80.
  Wiese, Moritz & Boche, Holger
  
• Mosaics of combinatorial designs for information-theoretic security. Designs, Codes and Cryptography, 90(3), 593-632.
  Wiese, Moritz & Boche, Holger
  
• Arbitrarily Varying Wiretap Channels With Non-Causal Side Information at the Jammer. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 69(4), 2635-2663.
  Janda, Carsten Rudolf; Wiese, Moritz; Jorswieck, Eduard Axel & Boche, Holger
  
• ε-Almost collision-flat universal hash functions and mosaics of designs. Designs, Codes and Cryptography, 92(4), 975-998.
  Wiese, Moritz & Boche, Holger