Non-Systematic Codes for Physical Layer Security

TL;DR

This paper explores the use of non-systematic channel codes to enhance physical layer security by scrambling information bits, offering an alternative to puncturing techniques for securing communications against unauthorized receivers.

Contribution

It introduces non-systematic codes as a novel method for physical layer security, expanding the toolkit beyond existing puncturing techniques.

Findings

Non-systematic codes can effectively scramble information bits.

They can reduce the security gap between authorized and unauthorized channels.

The approach offers a new avenue for physical layer security schemes.

Abstract

This paper is a first study on the topic of achieving physical layer security by exploiting non-systematic channel codes. The chance of implementing transmission security at the physical layer is known since many years in information theory, but it is now gaining an increasing interest due to its many possible applications. It has been shown that channel coding techniques can be effectively exploited for designing physical layer security schemes, able to ensure that an unauthorized receiver, experiencing a channel different from that of the the authorized receiver, is not able to gather any information. Recently, it has been proposed to exploit puncturing techniques in order to reduce the security gap between the authorized and unauthorized channels. In this paper, we show that the same target can also be achieved by using non-systematic codes, able to scramble information bits within the transmitted codeword.