CAREER: Building Secure Wireless Communication Systems via Physical Layer Resources

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Due to the open nature of wireless communications, it is important to provide a comprehensive security solution to protect information exchanged over the wireless medium. Two approaches have been adopted in the existing studies. In the first approach, physical layer properties of wireless channels are exploited to achieve provably secure information transmission. However, the study of practical models that involve active attackers and dishonest legitimate users has been limited. In the second approach, cryptographic schemes that can deal with general practical models are adopted. However, these schemes ignore the physical properties of wireless channels and rely on unproved intractability assumptions. It is critical to create synergies between these two approaches and design secure wireless systems that can deal with general scenarios while providing analytical security guarantees.This project aims to systematically exploit wireless channel physical layer resources to design secure wireless systems that provide provable confidentiality, integrity and privacy. Two main thrusts are investigated in this project. In the first thrust, a layered design approach, which uses physical layer resources to generate information theoretically secure keys needed for upper layer security primitives, is developed. In the second thrust, a cross-layer design approach that explicitly exploits physical layer resources in the design of upper layer security primitives is studied. This approach involves the development of novel performance metrics that have elements from both information theory and cryptography and the design of schemes under these new metrics. The research is fully integrated with three phases of engineering education: a) outreach to high school students; b) project- and research-oriented undergraduate student education; and c) graduate students training through new course development, mentoring and industry collaboration.