Secure Transmission with Multiple Antennas: The MISOME Wiretap Channel

The role of multiple antennas for secure communication is investigated within the framework of Wyner’s wiretap channel. We characterize the secrecy capacity in terms of generalized eigenvalues when the sender and eavesdropper have multiple antennas, the intended receiver has a single antenna, and the channel matrices are fixed and known to all the terminals, and show that a beamforming strategy is capacity-achieving. In addition, we show that in the high signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio regime the penalty for not knowing eavesdropper’s channel is small—a simple “secure space-time code” that can be thought of as masked beamforming and radiates power isotropically attains near-optimal performance. In the limit of large number of antennas, we obtain a realization-independent characterization of the secrecy capacity as a function of the number β: the number of eavesdropper antennas per sender antenna. We show that the eavesdropper is comparatively ineffective when β < 1, but that for β ≥ 2 the eavesdropper can drive the secrecy capacity to zero, thereby blocking secure communication to the intended receiver. Extensions to ergodic fading channels are also provided.