Creating and sharing knowledge for telecommunications

Project: Wireless Interference and Coding for Secrecy

Acronym: WINCE
Main Objective:
The main goal of this project is to advance the state-of-the art on physical-layer techniques to secure wireless networks under eavesdropper adversaries that aim to overhear unintended information. The almost-permanent connectivity of people and things to the Internet that we are currently approaching poses several security and privacy challenges, such as how to assure confidentiality in spontaneous networks of unknown users/devices, where key-exchange is deemed difficult. Physical-layer security is gaining interest as a means to provide an extra layer of security that does not depend on the traditional cryptographic key-exchange, but takes advantage of the inherent varying characteristics of wireless channels to establish secure communication.
In this work, we plan to develop, implement and evaluate practical physical-layer security techniques based on coding and spread spectrum methods. In particular, we plan to develop interleaving for secrecy mechanisms, where the access to a degraded version of the interleaving key acts as the source of advantage over an adversary eavesdropper. Moreover, to provide periods of advantageous communication for interleaving key exchange, we shall develop spread spectrum frequency-hopping mechanisms combined with jamming over eavesdroppers and tailor the operation of such mechanisms to provide the highest possible advantage over the eavesdropper.
The developed techniques shall form the basis for more evolved physical-layer security schemes, such as combined with cognitive radios – intelligent radio interfaces that can be programmed and configured dynamically to react more intelligently to environment changes – to enable embedded security services in the next generation of spectrum efficient wireless networks.
Reference: C00356
Funding: IT/LA
Start Date: 01-09-2014
End Date: 01-09-2015
Team: Marco Alexandre Cravo Gomes, João Paulo Vilela
Groups: Multimedia Signal Processing – Co
Partners: Centro de Informática e Sistemas da Universidade de Coimbra (CISUC)
Local Coordinator: Marco Alexandre Cravo Gomes
Links: Internal Page

Associated Publications
  • 1Papers in Journals
  • J.P. Vilela, M. Gomes, D. C. Sarmento, W. K. Harrison Harrison, F.F.D Dias, Interleaved Concatenated Coding for Secrecy in the Finite Blocklength Regime, IEEE Signal Processing Letters, Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 356 - 360, March, 2016,
    | Abstract
    | Full text (PDF 453 KBs) | BibTex
  • 1Papers in Conferences
  • D. C. Sarmento, J.P. Vilela, W. K. Harrison Harrison, M. Gomes, Interleaved Coding for Secrecy with a Hidden Key, IEEE GLOBECOM 2015 Workshop on Trusted Communications with Physical Layer Security, San Diego, CA, United States, Vol. -, pp. - - -, December, 2015,
    | Abstract
    | BibTex
  • 1Patents
  • M. Gomes, J.P. Vilela, Interleaved concatenated coding method, transmitter, receiver and system for secret wireless communications, PCT/IB2016/052703, PCT, 11-05-2015,
    | Abstract