On Secure Wireless Communications for IoT Under Eavesdropper Collusion

• Published in: IEEE transactions on automation science and engineering 2016-07, Vol.13 (3), p.1281-1293
• Main Authors: Zhang, Yuanyu, Shen, Yulong, Wang, Hua, Yong, Jianming, Jiang, Xiaohong
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Cauchy problems; Communication system security; Data collection; Eavesdropper collusion; Electronic eavesdropping; Integrals; Internet; Internet of Things; Internet of Things (IoT); Laplace transforms; Mathematical models; Outages; physical layer security; Probability distribution; Relays; Secrecy aspects; secrecy outage performance; Security; Security management; Sensors; Theorems; Wireless communication; Wireless communications; Wireless sensor networks
• ISSN: 1545-5955; 1558-3783
• DOI: 10.1109/TASE.2015.2497663

Wireless communication is one of the key technologies that actualize the Internet of Things (IoT) concept into the real world. Understanding the security performance of wireless communications lays the foundation for the security management of IoT. Eavesdropper collusion represents a significant threat to wireless communication security, while physical-layer security serves as a promising approach to providing a strong form of security guarantee. This paper studies the important secrecy outage performance of wireless communications under eavesdropper collusion, where the physical layer security is adopted to counteract such attack. Based on the classical Probability Theory, we first conduct analysis on the secrecy outage of the simple noncolluding case in which eavesdroppers do not collude and operate independently. For the secrecy outage analysis of the more hazardous M-colluding scenario, where any M eavesdroppers can combine their observations to decode the message, the techniques of Laplace transform, keyhole contour integral, and Cauchy Integral Theorem are jointly adopted to work around the highly cumbersome multifold convolution problem involved in such analysis, such that the related signal-to-interference ratio modeling for all colluding eavesdroppers can be conducted and thus the corresponding secrecy outage probability can be analytically determined. Finally, simulation and numerical results are provided to illustrate our theoretical achievements. An interesting observation suggests that the SOP increases first superlinearly and then sublinearly with M.