Feasibility of short blocklength Reed-Muller codes for physical layer security in real environment

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that short blocklength Reed-Muller codes can effectively secure data transmission in real-world environments using SDRs, leveraging coset coding and neural estimation to ensure confidentiality with low latency.

Contribution

It introduces a practical implementation of RM codes for physical-layer security in real environments, utilizing coset coding and neural estimation for leakage quantification.

Findings

RM codes achieve robust security in real-world channels

Coset coding enables secure data partitioning and decoding

Mutual information neural estimation validates low information leakage

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the application of Reed-Muller (RM) codes for Physical-layer security in a real world wiretap channel scenario. Utilizing software-defined radios (SDRs) in a real indoor environment, we implement a coset coding scheme that leverages the hierarchical structure of RM codes to secure data transmission. The generator matrix of the RM code is used to partition codewords into cosets in the usual way, where each message corresponds to a unique coset, and auxiliary bits select specific codewords within each coset. This approach enables the legitimate receiver (Bob) can decode the transmitted message with minimal information leakage to eavesdropper (Eve) thus protecting the confidentiality of the communication with the help of coset structure. Mutual information neural estimation (MINE) is used to quantify information leakage and validate the effectiveness of the scheme. Experimental results indicate that RM codes can achieve robust security even in practical environments affected by real-world channel impairments. These findings demonstrate the potential of RM codes as an efficient solution for physical-layer security, particularly for applications that require low latency and short blocklengths.