Network Engineering Techniques for Wireless Security

Duration: 19 Feb 14 to 18 Aug 17
PI and Co-PI: Dr Jemin Lee / Assoc Prof Tony Quek (PI)
Project manager: Angie Ng
Researchers:Ruei-Hau Hsu, Dr Parthajit Mohapatra, Jay Prakash, Jue Wang, Dr Prosanta Gope, Dr Thai Truyen Dai Chan, Dr Liu Chenxi, Jeya Pradha Jeyaraj, Archit Goya
Funding agency: Ministry of Defence

Wireless security is a critical issue in many applications when people rely on wireless networks for transmitting important and private information. Although wireless communications offer reliable and efficient communication, the vulnerabilities that inherently reside in wireless medium can result in security risks. This motivates our principal research on wireless security for the design of reliable and confidential wireless networks.

This project is to establish a new paradigm to secure wireless networks by developing network engineering techniques exploiting intrinsic physical channel properties and network configuration such as spatial node distribution and communication protocol for enhancing wireless security. The general aim is to develop physical-layer security techniques and integrated-layer security techniques with demonstrating through theoretical models and proof-of-principle experiments. Firstly, this project will develop the secret key generation algorithm that exploit the physical channels and develop interference engineering techniques for enhancing both the communication confidentiality and reliability by interference. Secondly, this project will develop the integrated-layer security techniques to consider all security levels and techniques at higher layers as well as the physical layer. Thirdly, this project will develop physical-layer security techniques for a smart grid network from the understanding of a realistic smart grid network structure. Finally, we will implement the proposed security techniques on an experimental software-defined radio testbed to assess the robustness of the proposed techniques in realistic settings. The proposed research will go beyond the state of the art by exploiting intrinsic physical properties of wireless networks for security and bridging the gap between information theory and engineering solutions.

TASK	TEAM	DESCRIPTION
Task 1 Physical-Layer Security Techniques for Wireless Networks	Jemin Lee, Chan Thai, Jue Wang, Parthajit Mohapatra	The development of physical-layer security techniques by exploiting intrinsic properties of channels. The main technical challenges will be to exploit the channel properties for reliable secret key generation in physical layer and to manage network interference for enhancing both communication confidentiality and reliability.
Task 2 Integrated-Layer Design for Wireless Security	Jemin Lee, Ruei-Hau Hsu	The integrated design for wireless security to develop the security techniques considering multiple layer protocols. The main technical challenges will be to understand the interplay between layered security techniques and to develop the integrated-layer security techniques for enhancing both the wireless security and the network performance.
Task 3 Robust Wireless Security Techniques in Smart Grid Networks	Jemin Lee, Parthajit Mohapatra	The development of physical-layer security techniques for smart grid network secrecy. The main technical challenges will be to develop theoretical tools powerful enough to study the complex features of smart grid networks and to develop robust network optimization algorithms under imperfect knowledge of eavesdropping networks.
Task 4 Implementation of Wireless Security Techniques in a Wireless Testbed	Jemin Lee, Chan Thai, Jay Prakash	The demonstration of a secure wireless architecture on an experimental software-defined radio testbed to assess the robustness of the proposed wireless security techniques. The main technical challenges will be to tailor the proposed algorithms and techniques in idealized models to real-world channels.