Algorithms and architecture for multiusers, multi-terminal, multi-layer information theoretic security

As modern infrastructure systems become increasingly more complex, we are faced with many new challenges in the area of information security. In this thesis we examine some approaches to security based on ideas from information theory. The protocols considered in this thesis, build upon the “wiretap channel,” a model for physical layer security proposed by A. Wyner in 1975. At a higher level, the protocols considered here can strengthen existing mechanisms for security by providing a new location based approach at the physical layer. In the first part of this thesis, we extend the wiretap channel model to the case when there are multiple receivers, each experiencing a time varying fading channel. Both the scenario when each legitimate receiver wants a common message as well as the scenario when they all want separate messages are studied and capacity results are established in several special cases. When each receiver wants a separate independent message, an opportunistic scheme that transmits to the strongest user at each time, and uses Gaussian codebooks is shown to achieve the sum secrecy capacity in the limit of many users. When each receiver wants a common message, a lower bound to the capacity is provided, independent of the number of receivers. In the second part of the thesis the role of multiple antennas for secure communication studied. We establish the secrecy capacity of the multi antenna wiretap channel (MIMOME channel), when the channel matrices of the legitimate receiver and eavesdropper are fixed and known to all the terminals. To establish the capacity, a new computable upper bound on the secrecy capacity of the wiretap channel is developed, which may be of independent interest. It is shown that Gaussian codebooks suffice to attain the capacity for this problem. For the case when the legitimate receiver has a single antenna (MISOME channel) a rank one transmission scheme is shown to attain the capacity. In the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, it is shown that a capacity achieving scheme involves simultaneous diagonalization of the channel matrices using the generalized singular value decomposition and independently coding accross the resulting parallel channels. Furthermore a semi-blind masked beamforming scheme is studied, which transmits signal of interest in the subspace of