Certain investigations on physical layer security and privacy preserving location authentication techniques for secure wireless communications

Abstract

The radical growth of wireless communication technology has led wireless network applications to take a giant leap in diversified fields including civil and defence applications. However, due to its inherent broadcast nature, wireless networks are prone to severe physical layer security threats like eavesdropping, jamming, traffic analysis, and so on. Information security, thus becomes imperative in a wireless communication system. newlineTraditional security approaches mostly rely on cryptographic techniques. But the level of security in such techniques depends on the level of complexity and sophistication of cryptographic algorithms which makes them less suitable for resource-limited wireless devices. Modern era wireless devices that are deployed in Internet of Things, Fifth Generation networks, Body Area Network, Visible Line Communication and so on, are light weighted and small sized, in terms of processing, storage and power. In symmetric key cryptography, the secret key required for encryption and decryption is needed to be shared between transmitter and receiver in advance, which is an additional challenge in the presence of eavesdropper especially in a large heterogenous network. Also, traditional cryptographic techniques can become vulnerable to security attacks if the adversary have sufficient computational power which is now possible with the growing developments in quantum computation. newline