Code-Hopping Based Transmission Scheme for Wireless Physical-Layer Security

Abstract EN

Due to the broadcast and time-varying natures of wireless channels, traditional communication systems that provide data encryption at the application layer suffer many challenges such as error diffusion.

In this paper, we propose a code-hopping based secrecy transmission scheme that uses dynamic nonsystematic low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes and automatic repeat-request (ARQ) mechanism to jointly encode and encrypt source messages at the physical layer.

In this scheme, secret keys at the transmitter and the legitimate receiver are generated dynamically upon the source messages that have been transmitted successfully.

During the transmission, each source message is jointly encoded and encrypted by a parity-check matrix, which is dynamically selected from a set of LDPC matrices based on the shared dynamic secret key.

As for the eavesdropper (Eve), the uncorrectable decoding errors prevent her from generating the same secret key as the legitimate parties.

Thus she cannot select the correct LDPC matrix to recover the source message.

We demonstrate that our scheme can be compatible with traditional cryptosystems and enhance the security without sacrificing the error-correction performance.

Numerical results show that the bit error rate (BER) of Eve approaches 0.5 as the number of transmitted source messages increases and the security gap of the system is small.