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INFORMATION THEORY ENABLED SECURE WIRELESS COMMUNICATION, KEY GENERATION AND AUTHENTICATION

Gungor, Onur

Abstract Details

2014, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Electrical and Computer Engineering.
The rapid growth in wireless communication systems has provided a flexibility of communication and content that has had a transformative impact to all aspects of society. However, the broadcast nature of the wireless medium makes these systems vulnerable to passive attacks in which the adversary attempts to eavesdrop on the transmitted messages, and to active attacks in which the adversary can intelligently manipulate legitimate transmissions, both of which can jeopardize a myriad of critical wireless services. Hence, it is imperative to design wireless networks with safeguards in place to ensure their resilience to attacks. To that end, this dissertation provides various perspectives in the domain of information theoretic secrecy and authentication, which provably guarantees security, regardless of the computational capabilities of the adversary. We strive to bridge the gap between the information theory of security and the practically implementable protocols within this paradigm. We first consider point to point secure communication over flat fading wireless channels under delay constraint. We extend the definition of outage capacity to account for the secrecy constraint and obtain sharp characterizations of the corresponding fundamental limits under different assumptions on the transmitter channel state information (CSI). The capacity achieving scheme relies on opportunistically exchanging private keys between the legitimate nodes. These keys are stored in a key buffer and used to secure delay sensitive data. We also characterize the optimal power control policies and analyze the effect of key buffer overflow on the overall outage probability. Next, we focus on investigating additional sources for generating secret key bits in mobile wireless networks. We propose an algorithm for secret key generation based on the observations of the relative locations between a pair of nodes. We test our algorithm in a vehicular setting based on observations made using wireless beacon exchange between the legitimate nodes. We also characterize theoretical bounds on achievable secret key bit rates under the presence of a possibly mobile eavesdropper, and illustrate, that relative localization information provides a significant additional resource for secret key generation in mobile networks. Finally, we focus on authentication based on the unique imperfections in the RF chain of radios, called the RF-Fingerprints. We develop a novel channel model for RF fingerprinting, and address the authentication problem in the presence of an adversary, where both the legitimate transmitter and the adversary are equipped with unique RF-fingerprints, in addition to a possible secret key available at the legitimate nodes. We provide bounds for the error exponents for reliable communication of the legitimate nodes, and the success exponent for impersonation and substitution attacks of the adversary. We illustrate that keyless authentication is possible via RF fingerprints if and only if the legitimate channel is not simulatable. In summary, this dissertation provides significant insights on practical implementation of information theory enabled secrecy and authentication protocols in wireless networks.
Can Emre Koksal (Advisor)
Hesham El Gamal (Advisor)
Ness Shroff (Committee Member)
207 p.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Gungor, O. (2014). INFORMATION THEORY ENABLED SECURE WIRELESS COMMUNICATION, KEY GENERATION AND AUTHENTICATION [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1406298547

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Gungor, Onur. INFORMATION THEORY ENABLED SECURE WIRELESS COMMUNICATION, KEY GENERATION AND AUTHENTICATION. 2014. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1406298547.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Gungor, Onur. "INFORMATION THEORY ENABLED SECURE WIRELESS COMMUNICATION, KEY GENERATION AND AUTHENTICATION." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1406298547

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)