Two-hop Secure Communication Using an Untrusted Relay

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that secure two-hop communication through an untrusted relay is possible using cooperative jamming, with the achievable secrecy rate approaching the upper bound at high relay power levels.

Contribution

It introduces a novel scheme employing cooperative jamming from helpers to achieve positive secrecy rates in untrusted relay scenarios.

Findings

Positive secrecy rate is achievable with helper-based cooperative jamming.

The gap between achievable rate and upper bound diminishes as relay power increases.

Cooperative jamming effectively prevents the relay from decoding the transmitted message.

Abstract

We consider a source-destination pair that can only communicate through an untrusted intermediate relay node. The intermediate node is willing to employ a designated relaying scheme to facilitate reliable communication between the source and the destination. Yet, the information it relays needs to be kept secret from it. In this two-hop communication scenario, where the use of the untrusted relay node is essential, we find that a positive secrecy rate is achievable. The center piece of the achievability scheme is the help provided by either the destination node with transmission capability, or an external "good samaritan" node. In either case, the helper performs cooperative jamming that confuses the eavesdropping relay and disables it from being able to decipher what it is relaying. We next derive an upper bound on the secrecy rate for this system. We observe that the gap between the upper bound and the achievable rate vanishes as the power of the relay node goes to infinity. Overall, the paper presents a case for intentional interference, i.e., cooperative jamming, as an enabler for secure communication.