Effective Performance Evaluation of Secure Communication and Identification Systems

• Applicants: Professor Dr.-Ing. Holger Boche; Professor Dr.-Ing. Rafael Schaefer
• Subject Area: Electronic Semiconductors, Components and Circuits, Integrated Systems, Sensor Technology, Theoretical Electrical Engineering
• Term: since 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 420862674

Modern communication systems need to satisfy pre-specified requirements on spectral efficiency and security. Physical layer security is a concept that unifies both and connects them with entropic quantities. In this project, a framework based on Turing machines is developed to address the question of deciding whether or not a communication system meets these requirements. It is known that the class of Turing solvable problems coincides with the class of algorithmically solvable problems so that this framework provides the theoretical basis for effective verification of such performance requirements. A key issue here is to decide whether or not the performance functions, i.e., capacities, and also actual code constructions of relevant communication scenarios, particularly those with secrecy requirements and active adversaries, are Turing computable. This is a necessary condition for the corresponding communication protocols to be effectively verifiable. Within this framework, several scenarios are studied including the wiretap channel and the wiretap channel with active jammer. These scenarios are first investigated for either secure communication tasks or secure identification tasks. Finally, a coherent system is developed and analyzed which integrates these different tasks simultaneously at the physical layer.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants