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1. Securing Wireless Communication via Hardware-Based Packet Obfuscation

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s41635-019-00070-0  

   Chacko, James; Juretus, Kyle; Jacovic, Marko; Sahin, Cem; Kandasamy, Nagarajan; Savidis, Ioannis; Dandekar, Kapil R. (May 2019, Journal of Hardware and Systems Security)

   Obfuscation of the orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) physical layer is described in this paper as a means to enhance the security of wireless communication. The standardization of the communication channel between two trusted parties results in a variety of security threats, including vulnerabilities in WPA/WPA2 protocols that allow for the extraction of the software layer encryption key. Obfuscating the physical layer of the OFDM pipeline provides an additional layer of security in the event that the software layer key is compromised and allows for rolling updates of the physical layer key without altering the software layer key. The interleaver stage of the OFDM pipeline is redesigned to utilize a physical layer key, which is termed Phy-Leave. The Phy-Leave interleaver is evaluated through both MATLAB simulation and hardware prototyping on the Software Defined Communication (SDC) testbed using a Virtex6 FPGA. The implemented rolling physical layer key policy and Phy-Leave system resulted in a less than 1% increase in the area of a Virtex6 FPGA, demonstrating physical layer obfuscation as a means to increase the security of wireless communication without a significant cost in hardware. 

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2. A Cooperative Jamming Game in Wireless Networks under Uncertainty

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63086-7_14  

   Xu, Z.; Baykal-Gürsoy, M. (December 2020, Security and Privacy in Communication Networks. SecureComm 2020. Lecture Notes)

   null (Ed.)

   Considered is a multi-channel wireless network for secret communication that uses the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) as the performance measure. An eavesdropper can intercept encoded messages through a degraded channel of each legitimate transmitter-receiver communication pair. A friendly interferer, on the other hand, may send cooperative jamming signals to enhance the secrecy performance of the whole network. Besides, the state information of the eavesdropping channel may not be known completely. The transmitters and the friendly interferer have to cooperatively decide on the optimal jamming power allocation strategy that balances the secrecy performance with the cost of employing intentional interference, while the eavesdropper tries to maximize her eavesdropping capacity. To solve this problem, we propose and analyze a non-zero-sum game between the network defender and the eavesdropper who can only attack a limited number of channels. We show that the Nash equilibrium strategies for the players are of threshold type. We present an algorithm to find the equilibrium strategy pair. Numerical examples demonstrate the equilibrium and contrast it to baseline strategies. 

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3. Secure computation of linear functions over linear discrete multiple-access wiretap channels

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ACSSC.2016.7869665  

   Goldenbaum, Mario; Boche, Holger; Poor, H. Vincent (November 2016, Proceedings of the 50th Annual Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers)

   In this paper, a joint source-channel coding approach is taken to the problem of securely computing a function of distributed sources over a multiple-access wiretap channel that is linear with respect to a finite field. It is shown that if the joint source distribution fulfills certain conditions and the function to be computed matches the linear structure of the channel, secrecy comes for free in the sense that the fundamental limit (i.e., the secrecy computation-capacity) is achieved without the need for stochastic encoding. Furthermore, the legitimate receiver does not need any advantage over the eavesdropper, which is in stark contrast to standard physical-layer security results. 

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4. Physical Layer Encryption for Wireless OFDM Communication Systems

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s41635-020-00097-8  

   Jacovic, Marko; Juretus, Kyle; Kandasamy, Nagarajan; Savidis, Ioannis; Dandekar, Kapil R. (July 2020, Journal of Hardware and Systems Security)

   Our everyday lives are impacted by the widespread adoption of wireless communication systems integral to residential, industrial, and commercial settings. Devices must be secure and reliable to support the emergence of large scale heterogeneous networks. Higher layer encryption techniques such as Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA/WPA2) are vulnerable to threats, including even the latest WPA3 release. Physical layer security leverages existing components of the physical or PHY layer to provide a low-complexity solution appropriate for wireless devices. This work presents a PHY layer encryption technique based on frequency induction for Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) signals to increase security against eavesdroppers. The secure transceiver consists of a key to frequency shift mapper, encryption module, and modified synchronizer for decryption. The system has been implemented on a Virtex-7 FPGA. The additional hardware overhead incurred on the Virtex-7 for both the transmitter and the receiver is low. Both simulation and hardware evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed system is capable of providing secure communication from an eavesdropper with no decrease in performance as compared with the baseline case of a standard OFDM transceiver. The techniques developed in this paper provide greater security to OFDM-based wireless communication systems. 

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5. ROBin: Known-Plaintext Attack Resistant Orthogonal Blinding via Channel Randomization

   Pan, Y and (April 2020, IEEE INFOCOM 2020)

   Orthogonal blinding based schemes for wireless physical layer security aim to achieve secure communication by injecting noise into channels orthogonal to the main channel and corrupting the eavesdropper’s signal reception. These methods, albeit practical, have been proven vulnerable against multiantenna eavesdroppers who can filter the message from the noise. The venerability is rooted in the fact that the main channel state remains stasis in spite of the noise injection, which allows an eavesdropper to estimate it promptly via known symbols and filter out the noise. Our proposed scheme leverages a reconfigurable antenna for Alice to rapidly change the channel state during transmission and a compressive sensing based algorithm for her to predict and cancel the changing effects for Bob. As a result, the communication between Alice and Bob remains clear, whereas randomized channel state prevents Eve from launching the knownplaintext attack. We formally analyze the security of the scheme against both single and multi-antenna eavesdroppers and identify its unique anti-eavesdropping properties due to the artificially created fast changing channel. We conduct extensive simulations and real-world experiments to evaluate its performance. Empirical results show that our scheme can suppress Eve’s attack success rate to the level of random guessing, even if she knows all the symbols transmitted through other antenna modes. 

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