SaTC: CORE: Small: Robust Physical Layer Security with Channel Knowledge Uncertainty

无线通信基础设施将在蜂窝网络之外产生重大影响，例如在新兴的物联网(IoT)网络、设备到设备通信和自主系统中。这类系统可能没有成熟的基础设施或能力，无法通过传统的加密方法实现保密。此外，无线传输介质的广播性会使它们容易因窃听而泄露信息。该项目开发了在无线信道存在不确定性的情况下实现可证明的无线安全的新方法。该项目的成果可以通过各种机制产生广泛的社会影响，这些机制可以实现物理层上的轻量级和可证明的安全通信，并有助于各种新兴应用的无线基础设施的可靠运行。除了研究影响，该项目还将通过课程开发和本科生和研究生的培训，以及通过亚利桑那大学科学、工程和数学(ASEM)学者计划和STEM学习中心开展的外联活动，产生教育影响。在过去十年中，关于如何利用无线信道知识实现保密，出现了几个重要而有趣的见解。尽管取得了这些进展，但物理层安全的实际可行性仍面临障碍，主要是因为通道知识不完全可用，而且几乎总是无法从敌对实体获得。该项目将为在对无线信道的准确了解很少或根本不存在的情况下实现保密奠定基础。无线安全对信道知识不确定性的稳健性背后的关键基础被认为植根于无线信道的基本属性：路径损耗、衰落和码间干扰。该项目不会将这些视为无线信道的负面属性，而是将设计出系统地利用这些属性中的统计异构性来获得针对外部对手的优势的方法，即使没有对无线信道的精确知识。该项目的具体目标是：(I)利用符号间干扰的异质性来实现仅具有关于信道的统计知识的保密性；(Ii)开发原则性的编码/解码机制，仅利用关于网络的拓扑知识来保证保密性；(Iii)将这些概念推广到具有不可信节点的大规模单跳和多跳网络；以及(Iv)获得具有统计信道知识的各种模型的相应保密能力的信息论界限。

Wireless communication infrastructure is poised to make a significant impact beyond cellular networks, such as in emerging internet-of-things (IoT) networks, device-to-device communications, and autonomous systems. Such systems may not have the full-fledged infrastructure or capabilities to achieve confidentiality via traditional cryptographic approaches. Furthermore, the broadcast nature of the wireless transmission medium can make them prone to information leakage through eavesdropping. This project develops new approaches to achieve provable wireless security in the presence of uncertainty about the wireless channel. The results of this project can have a wide reaching societal impact through mechanisms that can enable light-weight, and provably secure communication over the physical layer, and contribute to trustworthy operation of wireless infrastructure for various emerging applications. In addition to the research impact, the project will have an educational impact through curriculum development and the training of undergraduate and graduate students, in addition to outreach activities through the University of Arizona Science, Engineering and Mathematics (ASEM) scholars program and the STEM learning center.Over the last decade, several significant and fascinating insights have emerged on how to leverage knowledge of wireless channels to achieve secrecy. Despite these advances, the practical viability of physical layer security faces obstacles, primarily due to the fact that channel knowledge is available imperfectly, and is almost always unavailable from adversarial entities. This project will lay the foundations for achieving secrecy in scenarios where the precise knowledge about the wireless channel is minimal or non-existent. The key underpinnings behind making wireless security robust to channel knowledge uncertainty are argued to be rooted in the fundamental properties of wireless channels: path loss, fading, and inter-symbol interference. Instead of viewing these as negative attributes of the wireless channel, this project will devise approaches that systematically leverage statistical heterogeneity in these properties to gain advantage against external adversaries, even without the precise knowledge of the wireless channel. In particular, the specific goals of the project are: (i) to leverage heterogeneity of inter-symbol interference to achieve secrecy with only statistical knowledge about the channel; (ii) to develop principled encoding/decoding mechanisms that guarantee secrecy with only topological knowledge about the network; (iii) to generalize these concepts to large-scale single-hop and multi-hop networks with untrusted nodes; and (iv) to obtain information-theoretic bounds on the corresponding secrecy capacities for the various models with statistical channel knowledge.