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Suba Selvi
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14 views

English abstract

Uploaded by

Suba Selvi
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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CERTAIN INVESTIGATIONS ON PHYSICAL

LAYER SECURITY AND PRIVACY PRESERVING


LOCATION AUTHENTICATION TECHNIQUES
FOR SECURE WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS

ABSTRACT
of the Thesis

Submitted by

LAVANYA D L

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

FACULTY OF INFORMATION AND


COMMUNICATION ENGINEERING
ANNA UNIVERSITY
CHENNAI 600 025

FEBRUARY 2021
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ABSTRACT

The radical growth of wireless communication technology has led


wireless network applications to take a giant leap in diversified fields
including civil and defence applications. However, due to its inherent
broadcast nature, wireless networks are prone to severe physical layer security
threats like eavesdropping, jamming, traffic analysis, and so on. Information
security, thus becomes imperative in a wireless communication system.

Traditional security approaches mostly rely on cryptographic


techniques. But the level of security in such techniques depends on the level
of complexity and sophistication of cryptographic algorithms which makes
them less suitable for resource-limited wireless devices. Modern era wireless
devices that are deployed in IoT (Internet of Things), 5G (Fifth Generation)
networks, BAN (Body Area Network), VLC (Visible Line Communication)
and so on, are light weighted and small sized, in terms of processing, storage
and power. In symmetric key cryptography, the secret key required for
encryption and decryption is needed to be shared between transmitter and
receiver in advance, which is an additional challenge in the presence of
eavesdropper especially in a large heterogenous network. Also, traditional
cryptographic techniques can become vulnerable to security attacks if the
adversary have sufficient computational power which is now possible with the
growing developments in quantum computation.

Physical layer security (PLS) has emerged into an alternative


security technique to overcome the above limitations, sometimes as a
replacement or sometimes as an augmentation to the existing technique,
depending on the requirement and application. PLS is an information
theoretic scheme where the information is securely transmitted by using
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techniques based on physical properties of radio channel between transmitter


and receiver. Two fundamental properties of radio channel, namely,
reciprocity and randomness of wireless channels along with other attributes
pertaining to time, frequency and space domain are exploited in PLS approach
to achieve security.

An existing PLS technique based on adaptive modulation exploits


only channel phase for selecting modulation type. This method provides
confidentiality but without the consideration of spectral efficiency. So, there
is a need to achieve confidentiality maintaining the spectral efficiency. One
of the advantages of PLS is, it provides confidentiality irrespective of
computational power of eavesdropper. But to have an additional advantage of
improvement in spectral efficiency, suitable PLS security scheme has to be
devised to achieve confidentiality along with an improvement in spectral
efficiency. Location based services (LBS) can easily become victim to
spoofing attacks during the location authentication process. Also, the privacy
of the users is at risk in such services. Hence there a requirement to ensure
authenticity and preserve user’s privacy in an LBS system. Some of the real-
world applications like fintech (financial technology) demand the benefits of
both the PLS and traditional cryptographic technique to mitigate the growing
security threats. Thus, there arises a need to study the feasibility of enhancing
the existing cryptographic scheme with PLS scheme to achieve additional
security features.

In this thesis, four novel PLS schemes have been proposed to


improve confidentiality, authentication and privacy using physical layer
properties. A novel PLS scheme using adaptive modulation approach has
been proposed for improved confidentiality with acceptable symbol error rate
performance. Three-layer security features have been implemented using
signal to noise ratio (SNR), phase and symbol rotation. This scheme enhances
confidentiality by selecting the modulation size, type and rotation angle
3

adaptively, based on channel SNR and phase obtained from legitimate


channel. Robustness of the security scheme has been illustrated taking into
consideration of estimation errors, and the endurance of the proposed scheme
to eavesdropping attack has been analyzed by modelling two types of attacker
models.

To enhance confidentiality and spectral efficiency of Multiple Input


Multiple Output (MIMO) based wireless networks, an enhanced spatial
modulation (ESM) which provides improved spectral efficiency than spatial
modulation (SM), has been adopted and a novel PLS scheme has been
devised. In this method, physical layer signature like channel state
information (CSI) is used along with ESM to improve confidentiality as well
as spectral efficiency in MIMO systems. A secret key is generated from CSI
of the legitimate channel by the process of channel quantization. The
proposed scheme consists of constructing codebooks as per the ESM
technique and adaptively selecting the codebook based on channel SNR and
shuffling the codebook using the secret key. The performance of the proposed
method is evaluated in terms of robustness of the key, sensitiveness of
security scheme to key disagreement between user and adversary, Bit Error
Rate (BER) performance of the user and adversary, and spectral efficiency.
The proposed method shows significant improvement than the conventional
SM based MIMO system.

A novel privacy preserving physical layer authentication scheme


has been proposed for an LBS based wireless networks to enhance
authentication while preserving privacy. Physical layer signatures like CSI
and CFO (carrier frequency offset) were exploited in this technique to
implement security. In conventional techniques, Media Access Control
(MAC) address, used for authentication, are shared without encryption. In the
proposed technique, MAC is encrypted using the secret key derived from
physical layer signatures using Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to
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preserve privacy. Since the key, generated using SVD, is location specific and
varies with respect to the location, it is used for the location authentication.
This scheme enhances the authentication process of users to avail LBS,
without exposing users’ identity to eavesdroppers. The performance of the
proposed method over existing method has been evaluated using three
performance metrics namely, information leakage, bit mismatch ratio and
BER, and found that the proposed method outperforms the existing method.

A novel hybrid security scheme based on PLS and cryptography


has been proposed to provide a secured authentication scheme preserving
user’s privacy, for the application of mobile payments. This scheme provides
two levels of authentication, privacy preserving location authentication and
device authentication. User’s privacy is preserved by encrypting the identity
of the user by physical layer encryption based on user’s location. CSI and
CFO are used for physical layer encryption and device authentication,
required for mobile payment, is realized using asymmetric key cryptography
technique. The performance of the proposed method has been analyzed in
terms of information leakage to adversary, BER and transaction time in
comparison with existing method. The proposed technique gives better
performance than existing technique in terms of privacy and authentication
for mobile payment.

Thus, in this thesis a novel PLS scheme has been proposed to


achieve confidentiality, and subsequently to improve spectral efficiency along
with confidentiality, ESM based MIMO system has been chosen and an
adaptive PLS scheme has been devised to achieve confidentiality and spectral
efficiency. To provide authentication and privacy in an LBS system, PLS
scheme using CSI and CFO has been proposed. Subsequently this work has
been extended to a real-world application of mobile payments to provide
secured authentication preserving user’s privacy.

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