On the Secrecy Capacity of Block Fading Channels With a Hybrid Adversary

• Published in: IEEE transactions on information theory 2015-03, Vol.61 (3), p.1325-1343
• Main Authors: Basciftci, Yuksel Ozan, Gungor, Onur, Koksal, Can Emre, Ozguner, Fusun
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Communication channels; Data transmission; Decoding; Delays; Fading; Feedback control systems; Information theory; Jamming; Noise; Receivers; Receivers & amplifiers; Transmitters
• ISSN: 0018-9448; 1557-9654
• DOI: 10.1109/TIT.2014.2383397

We consider a block fading wiretap channel, where a transmitter attempts to send messages securely to a receiver in the presence of a hybrid half-duplex adversary, which arbitrarily decides to either jam or eavesdrop the transmitter-to-receiver channel. We provide bounds to the secrecy capacity for various possibilities on receiver feedback and show special cases where the bounds are tight. We show that, without any feedback from the receiver, the secrecy capacity is zero if the transmitter-to-adversary channel stochastically dominates the effective transmitter-to-receiver channel. However, the secrecy capacity is nonzero even when the receiver is allowed to feed back only one bit at the end of each block. Our novel achievable strategy improves the rates proposed in the literature for the nonhybrid adversarial model. We also analyze the effect of multiple adversaries and delay constraints on the secrecy capacity. We show that our novel time sharing approach leads to positive secrecy rates even under strict delay constraints.