Wireless Information-Theoretic Security - Part I: Theoretical Aspects

TL;DR

This paper explores the theoretical limits of secure wireless communication over fading channels, revealing that fading can enhance security even when eavesdroppers have better SNR, and defines the secrecy capacity in this context.

Contribution

It provides a complete characterization of secrecy capacity for quasi-static fading channels and shows that fading can enable security even with a stronger eavesdropper, contrasting with prior Gaussian channel results.

Findings

Secrecy capacity is achievable even when eavesdropper has better average SNR.

Fading channels can be exploited to enhance security in wireless communications.

The paper defines outage probability-based secrecy capacity for quasi-static fading channels.

Abstract

In this two-part paper, we consider the transmission of confidential data over wireless wiretap channels. The first part presents an information-theoretic problem formulation in which two legitimate partners communicate over a quasi-static fading channel and an eavesdropper observes their transmissions through another independent quasi-static fading channel. We define the secrecy capacity in terms of outage probability and provide a complete characterization of the maximum transmission rate at which the eavesdropper is unable to decode any information. In sharp contrast with known results for Gaussian wiretap channels (without feedback), our contribution shows that in the presence of fading information-theoretic security is achievable even when the eavesdropper has a better average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) than the legitimate receiver - fading thus turns out to be a friend and not a foe. The issue of imperfect channel state information is also addressed. Practical schemes for wireless information-theoretic security are presented in Part II, which in some cases comes close to the secrecy capacity limits given in this paper.