Physical Layer Anonymous Precoding: The Path to Privacy-Preserving Communications

Abstract

Next-generation systems aim to increase both the speed and responsiveness of wireless communications, while supporting compelling applications such as edge/cloud computing, remote-Health, vehicle-to-infrastructure communications, etc. As these applications are expected to carry confidential personal data, ensuring user privacy becomes a critical issue. In contrast to traditional security and privacy designs that aim to prevent confidential information from being eavesdropped upon by adversaries, or learned by unauthorized parties, in this paper we consider designs that mask the users identities during communication, hence resulting in anonymous communications. In particular, we examine the recent interest in physical layer (PHY) anonymous solutions. This line of research departs from conventional higher layer anonymous authentication/encryption and routing protocols, and judiciously manipulates the signaling pattern of transmitted signals in order to mask the senders' PHY characteristics. We first discuss the concept of anonymity at the PHY, and illustrate a strategy that is able to unmask the senders identity by analyzing his/her PHY information only, i.e., signalling patterns and the inherent fading characteristics. Subsequently, we overview the emerging area of anonymous precoding to preserve the sender's anonymity, while ensuring high receiver-side signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) for communication. This family of anonymous precoding designs represents a new approach to providing anonymity at the PHY, introducing a new dimension for privacy-preserving techniques.

Physical Layer Anonymous Precoding Design: From the Perspective of Anonymity Entropy

“…Nevertheless, those methods inevitably reduce the data fidelity. In e-Health scenarios, the fidelity of data is critical, which makes the data perturbation mechanism less desirable [10]. In this case, anonymous communication that provides a high level of data accuracy towards a receiver while guaranteeing senders' anonymity, plays an important role in the family of privacy design.…”

“…For example, when an anonymously authenticated/encrypted sender transmits a signal to the AP, the received signal is always coupled with the sender's unique propagation channel. Hence, the recipient can analyze the signalling patterns of the received signal to unmask the data sender [10]. To this end, the work in [24] was the first to investigate sender detection (SD) and corresponding countermeasures at the PHY layer, where the detector exploits the characteristics of the received signal for unmasking the sender.…”

“…From the point of view of security, an illegitimate adversary aims to eavesdrop the signal of other communication parties, and decipher the embedded data [1]. In contrast, in the context of privacy, an adversary may be the legitimate receiver of the data, but out of curiosity wants to infer the sender's non-shared data [2], or the sender's ID [10] from the received data. 2) Accordingly, the protection mechanisms against security and privacy intrusions are different.…”

Covert Performance for Integrated Satellite Multiple Terrestrial Relay Networks with Partial Relay Selection

“…Further, with the help of [ 16 ], the ACR can be re-written as: where and is the exponential integral function.…”

“…An adaptive physical-layer key generation scheme was proposed in Smart Homes in [ 15 ]. The authors of [ 16 ] considered designs that mask the user’s identity during communication, resulting in anonymous communications, and in particular, examined the recent interest in physical layer anonymous solutions. Moreover, in [ 17 ], the authors provided a tutorial overview of the promising intelligent reflection communication (IRC) technologies and articulated multiple ways of enhancing the security of Internet-of-Everything (IoE) by the IRC.…”