This letter studies the problem of maintaining information freshness under passive eavesdropping attacks. The classical three-node wiretap channel model is considered, in which a source aims to send its latest status wirelessly to its intended destination, while protecting the message from being overheard by an eavesdropper. Considering that conventional channel capacity-based secrecy metrics are no longer adequate to measure the information timeliness in status update systems, we define two new age of information-based metrics to characterize the secrecy performance of the considered system. We further propose, analyze, and optimize a randomized stationary transmission policy implemented at the source for further enhancing the secrecy performance. Simulation results are provided to validate our analysis and optimization.
In this paper, we propose an algorithm that targets contamination and eavesdropping adversaries. We consider the case when the number of independent packets available to the eavesdropper is less than the multicast capacity of the network. By means of our algorithm every node can verify the integrity of the received packets easily and an eavesdropper is unable to get any meaningful information about the source. We call it practical security if an eavesdropper is unable to get any meaningful information about the source.We show that, by giving up a small amount of overall capacity, our algorithm…
This work investigates the possibility of using non-orthogonal multi-carrier waveforms to defend against eavesdropping attacks. The sophisticated detection required for non-orthogonal signals provides a natural defence mechanism in secure communications. However, brute-force tactics such as maximum likelihood detection would break the defence by attempting all possible solutions. Thus, a waveform scaling strategy is proposed to scale up the number of non-orthogonally packed sub-carriers, which complicates signal detections and prevents eavesdropping. In addition, a waveform tuning strategy is …
We present a supervised secure entanglement sharing protocol via tripartite W states for faithful quantum teleportation. By guaranteeing a secure entanglement distribution in the charge of a third believed supervisor, quantum information of an unknown state of a 2-level particle can be faithfully teleported from the sender to the remote receiver via the Bell states distilled from the tripartite W states. We emphasize that reliable teleportation after our protocol between two communication parties depends on the agreement of the supervisor to cooperate via taking the W states as both the quantu…
While data from Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems is sent upstream, it is both the length of pulses as well as their frequency present an excellent opportunity to incor-porate statistical fingerprinting. This is so, because datagrams in SCADA traffic follow a poison distribution. Although wrapping the SCADA traffic in a protective IPsec stream is an obvious choice, thin clients and unreliable communication channels make is less than ideal to use crypto-graphic solutions for security SCADA traffic. In this paper, we propose a smart alternative of data obfuscation in the f…
Molecular communication in nanonetworks is an emerging communication paradigm that uses molecules as information carriers. Achieving a secure information exchange is one of the practical challenges that need to be considered to address the potential of molecular communications in nanonetworks. In this article, we have introduced secure channel into molecular communications to prevent eavesdropping. First, we propose a Diffie Hellman algorithm-based method by which communicating nanomachines can exchange a secret key through molecular signaling. Then, we use this secret key to perform ciphering…
The pilot spoofing attack is considered as an active eavesdropping activity launched by an adversary during the reverse channel training phase. By transmitting the same pilot signal as the legitimate user, the pilot spoofing attack is able to degrade the quality of legitimate transmission and, more severely, facilitate eavesdropping. In an effort to detect the pilot spoofing attack and minimize its damages, in this paper we propose a novel random-training-assisted (RTA) pilot spoofing detection algorithm. In particular, we develop a new training mechanism by adding a random training phase afte…
We in this paper introduce an advanced eavesdropper that aims to paralyze the artificial-noise-aided secure communications. We consider the M-1-2 Gaussian MISO wiretap channel, which consists of a M-antenna transmitter, a single-antenna receiver, and a two-antenna eavesdropper. This type of eavesdropper, by adopting an optimal Grassmann manifold (OGM) filtering structure, can reduce the maximum achievable secrecy rate (MASR) to be zero by using only two receive antennas, regardless of the number of antennas at the transmitter. Specifically, the eavesdropper exploits linear filters to serially …
This paper considers secure simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) in cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The system consists of a large number of randomly (Poisson-distributed) located access points (APs) serving multiple information users (IUs) and an information-untrusted dual-antenna active energy harvester (EH). The active EH uses one antenna to legitimately harvest energy and the other antenna to eavesdrop information. The APs are networked by a centralized infinite backhaul which allows the APs to synchronize and cooperate via a central…
Communication security could be enhanced at physical layer but at the cost of complex algorithms and redundant hardware, which would render traditional physical layer security (PLS) techniques unsuitable for use with resource-constrained communication systems. This work investigates a waveform-defined security (WDS) framework, which differs fundamentally from traditional PLS techniques used in today's systems. The framework is not dependent on channel conditions such as signal power advantage and channel state information (CSI). Therefore, the framework is more reliable than channel dependent …
Sensitive digital data, such as health information or governmental archives, are often stored for decades or centuries. The processing of such data calls for long-term security. Secure channels on the Internet require robust key establishment methods. Currently used key distribution protocols are either vulnerable to future attacks based on Shor's algorithm, or vulnerable in principle due to their reliance on computational problems. Quantum-based key distribution protocols are information-theoretically secure and offer long-term security. However, significant obstacles to their real-world use …
Relay transmission can enhance coverage and throughput, while it can be vulnerable to eavesdropping attacks due to the additional transmission of the source message at the relay. Thus, whether or not one should use relay transmission for secure communication is an interesting and important problem. In this paper, we consider the transmission of a confidential message from a source to a destination in a decentralized wireless network in the presence of randomly distributed eavesdroppers. The source-destination pair can be potentially assisted by randomly distributed relays. For an arbitrary rel…
Much research has been conducted to securely outsource multiple parties' data aggregation to an untrusted aggregator without disclosing each individual's data, or to enable multiple parties to jointly aggregate their data while preserving privacy. However, those works either assume to have a secure channel or suffer from high complexity. Here we consider how an external aggregator or multiple parties learn some algebraic statistics (e.g., summation, product) over participants' data while any individual's input data is kept secret to others (the aggregator and other participants). We assume cha…
Over-the-air computation has the potential to increase the communication-efficiency of data-dependent distributed wireless systems, but is vulnerable to eavesdropping. We consider over-the-air computation over block-fading additive white Gaussian noise channels in the presence of a passive eavesdropper. The goal is to design a secure over-the-air computation scheme. We propose a scheme that achieves MSE-security against the eavesdropper by employing zero-forced artificial noise, while keeping the distortion at the legitimate receiver small. In contrast to former approaches, the security does n…
Recently, Alomair et al. proposed the first UnConditionally Secure mutual authentication protocol for low-cost RFID systems(UCS-RFID). The security of the UCS-RFID relies on five dynamic secret keys which are updated at every protocol run using a fresh random number (nonce) secretly transmitted from a reader to tags. Our results show that, at the highest security level of the protocol (security parameter= 256), inferring a nonce is feasible with the probability of 0.99 by eavesdropping(observing) about 90 runs of the protocol. Finding a nonce enable a passive attacker to recover all five secre…
