Background and description
In commercial wireless standards, the protection against eavesdropping attacks has been provided by cryptographic protocols. The secrecy provided by these protocols relies on the assumption that some complex mathematical problems would take thousands of years to be solved using conventional computing methods. However, with the recent progresses in the field of quantum processing, some of these problems will be solvable, making less secure the current cryptographic techniques.
In wireless networks, one of the solutions to address these new threats in secrecy is physical layer security. The main area behind physical layer security is to use the channel dynamics to create uncertainty at the eavesdropper. Contrarily to what happens with commercial cryptosystems, in physical layer security the secrecy performance is quantified from an information theoretical perspective not relying on any type of technological limitation at the eavesdropper. This invention was designed and evaluated using physical layer security principles and comprises an innovative secure channel training scheme that protects a NOMA system against eavesdropping attacks coming from inside and outside of the network.
