Uncoordinated Frequency Hopping for Wireless Secrecy Against Non-degraded Eavesdroppers

Authors

Abstract

Current physical-layer security techniques typically rely on a degraded eavesdropper, thus warranting some sort of advantage that can be relied upon to achieve higher levels of security. We consider instead non-degraded eavesdroppers that possess equal or better capabilities than legitimate receivers. Under this challenging setup, most of current physical-layer security techniques become hard to administer and new dimensions to establish advantageous periods of communication are needed. For that, we consider employing a spread spectrum uncoordinated frequency hopping scheme aided by friendly jammers for improved secrecy. We characterize the secrecy level of this spread spectrum scheme, by devising a stochastic geometry mathematical model to assess the secure packet throughput (probability of secure communication) of devices operating under Uncoordinated Frequency Hopping that accommodates the impact of friendly jammers. We further implement and evaluate these techniques in a real-world test-bed of software-defined radios. Results show that although Uncoordinated Frequency Hopping with jamming leads to low secure packet throughput values, by exploiting frequency diversity these methods may be used for establishing secret keys. We propose a method for secret-key establishment that builds on the advantage provided by Uncoordinated Frequency Hopping and jamming to establish secret-keys, notably against non-degraded adversary eavesdroppers that may appear in advantageous situations.

Related Project

SWING2 - Securing Wireless Networks with Coding and Jamming

Journal

IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, January 2018

PDF File

DOI