Mahtab Mirmohseni

Denis Kozlov, Mahtab Mirmohseni, Rahim Tafazolli

This paper investigates an information-theoretic model of secure semantic-aware communication. For this purpose, we consider the lossy joint source-channel coding (JSCC) of a memoryless semantic source transmitted over a memoryless wiretap channel. The source consists of two correlated parts that represent semantic and observed aspects of the information. Our model assumes separate fidelity and secrecy constraints on each source component and, in addition, encompasses two cases for the source output, in order to evaluate the performance gains if the encoder has an extended access to the source. Specifically, in Case 1, the encoder has direct access only to the samples from a single (observed) source component, while in Case 2 it has additional direct access to the samples of the underlying semantic information. We derive single-letter converse and achievability bounds on the rate-distortion-equivocation region. The converse bound explicitly contains rate-distortion functions, making it easy to evaluate, especially for some common distributions. The proposed achievability coding scheme involves novel stochastic superposition coding with two private parts to enable analysis of the equivocation for each source component, separately. Our results generalise some of the previously established source and source-channel coding problems. The general results are further specialised to Gaussian and Bernoulli sources transmitted over Gaussian and binary wiretap channels, respectively. The numerical evaluations illustrate the derived bounds for these distributions.

Alireza Ghazavi Khorasgani, Mahtab Mirmohseni, Ahmed Elzanaty

This paper characterizes the optimal capacity-distortion (C-D) tradeoff in an optical point-to-point system with single-input single-output (SISO) for communication and single-input multiple-output (SIMO) for sensing within an integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) framework. We consider the optimal rate-distortion (R-D) region and explore several inner (IB) and outer bounds (OB). We introduce practical, asymptotically optimal maximum a posteriori (MAP) and maximum likelihood estimators (MLE) for target distance, addressing nonlinear measurement-to-state relationships and non-conjugate priors. As the number of sensing antennas increases, these estimators converge to the Bayesian Cramér-Rao bound (BCRB). We also establish that the achievable rate-Cramér-Rao bound (R-CRB) serves as an OB for the optimal C-D region, valid for both unbiased estimators and asymptotically large numbers of receive antennas. To clarify that the input distribution determines the tradeoff across the Pareto boundary of the C-D region, we propose two algorithms: i) an iterative Blahut-Arimoto algorithm (BAA)-type method, and ii) a memory-efficient closed-form (CF) approach. The CF approach includes a CF optimal distribution for high optical signal-to-noise ratio (O-SNR) conditions. Additionally, we adapt and refine the deterministic-random tradeoff (DRT) to this optical ISAC context.

Abolfazl Changizi, Ali H. Abdollahi Bafghi, Mahtab Mirmohseni et al.

This paper studies cache-aided wireless networks in the presence of active intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) from an information-theoretic perspective. Specifically, we investigate interference management in a cache-aided wireless network assisted by an active IRS to enhance the achievable degrees of freedom (DoF). To this end, we jointly design the content placement, delivery phase, and IRS coefficients, and propose a one-shot achievability scheme. Our scheme exploits transmitters' cooperation, cache contents, interference alignment, and IRS capabilities, based on the network parameters. We derive the achievable one-shot sum-DoF for different cache sizes, network configurations, and numbers of IRS elements, followed by an upper bound. Our results highlight the potential of deploying an IRS in cache-aided wireless communication systems. In particular, they underscore the enhancement of achievable DoF for various parameter regimes, especially when cache sizes are inadequate. Notably, we show that access to an IRS with a sufficient number of elements enables the achievement of the maximum possible DoF for various parameter regimes of interest.

Denis Kozlov, Mahtab Mirmohseni, Rahim Tafazolli

We study the problem of secure joint source-channel coding for multimodal semantic sources transmitted over noisy wiretap channels. The source model consists of $m$ modalities (e.g., image, audio, and sensor data), all represented as random variables. The encoder observes independent and identically distributed samples of an arbitrary non-empty subset of modalities. The samples are encoded and transmitted over a discrete memoryless wiretap channel. The legitimate receiver reconstructs all modalities. We extend the rate-distortion-perception problem formulation to multimodal sources. We establish converse and achievability bounds on the fundamental limits of transmission rate, fidelity, and secrecy, under per-modality distortion and perception constraints, and per-subset equivocation constraints. We show that the fundamental limit for secrecy consists of three operationally distinct components: the level of compression, the secret key rate, and the statistics of the wiretap channel.

Marziyeh Soltani, Mahtab Mirmohseni, Panos Papadimitratos

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems are highly efficient. Massive MIMO systems are inherently resistant to passive attackers (eavesdroppers), thanks to transmissions directed to the desired users. However, active attackers can transmit a combination of legitimate user pilot signals during the channel estimation phase. This way they can mislead the base station (BS) to rotate the transmission in their direction, and allow them to eavesdrop during the downlink data transmission phase. In this paper, we analyse this vulnerability in an improved system model and stronger adversary assumptions, and investigate how physical layer security can mitigate such attacks and ensure secure (confidential) communication. We derive the secrecy outage probability (SOP) and a lower bound on the ergodic secrecy capacity, using stochastic geometry tools when the number of antennas in the BSs tends to infinity. We adapt the result to evaluate the secrecy performance in massive orthogonal multiple access (OMA). We find that appropriate power allocation allows NOMA to outperform OMA in terms of ergodic secrecy rate and SOP.

Ali Khalesi, Mahtab Mirmohseni, Mohammad Ali Maddah-Ali

In this paper, we study the problem of distributed multi-user secret sharing, including a trusted master node, $N\in \mathbb{N}$ storage nodes, and $K$ users, where each user has access to the contents of a subset of storage nodes. Each user has an independent secret message with certain rate, defined as the size of the message normalized by the size of a storage node. Having access to the secret messages, the trusted master node places encoded shares in the storage nodes, such that (i) each user can recover its own message from the content of the storage nodes that it has access to, (ii) each user cannot gain any information about the message of any other user. We characterize the capacity region of the distributed multi-user secret sharing, defined as the set of all achievable rate tuples, subject to the correctness and privacy constraints. In the achievable scheme, for each user, the master node forms a polynomial with the degree equal to the number of its accessible storage nodes minus one, where the value of this polynomial at certain points are stored as the encoded shares. The message of that user is embedded in some of the coefficients of the polynomial. The remaining coefficients are determined such that the content of each storage node serves as the encoded shares for all users that have access to that storage node.

Hamidreza Ehteram, Mohammad Ali Maddah-Ali, Mahtab Mirmohseni

The emerging applications of machine learning algorithms on mobile devices motivate us to offload the computation tasks of training a model or deploying a trained one to the cloud or at the edge of the network. One of the major challenges in this setup is to guarantee the privacy of the client data. Various methods have been proposed to protect privacy in the literature. Those include (i) adding noise to the client data, which reduces the accuracy of the result, (ii) using secure multiparty computation (MPC), which requires significant communication among the computing nodes or with the client, (iii) relying on homomorphic encryption (HE) methods, which significantly increases computation load at the servers. In this paper, we propose $\textit{Corella}$ as an alternative approach to protect the privacy of data. The proposed scheme relies on a cluster of servers, where at most $T \in \mathbb{N}$ of them may collude, each running a learning model (e.g., a deep neural network). Each server is fed with the client data, added with $\textit{strong}$ noise, independent from user data. The variance of the noise is set to be large enough to make the information leakage to any subset of up to $T$ servers information-theoretically negligible. On the other hand, the added noises for different servers are $\textit{correlated}$. This correlation among the queries allows the parameters of the models running on different servers to be $\textit{trained}$ such that the client can mitigate the contribution of the noises by combining the outputs of the servers, and recover the final result with high accuracy and with a minor computational effort. Simulation results for various datasets demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed approach for the classification, using deep neural networks, and the autoencoder, as supervised and unsupervised learning tasks, respectively.

Mahtab Mirmohseni, Mohammad Ali Maddah-Ali

The widespread use of cloud computing services raises the question of how one can delegate the processing tasks to the untrusted distributed parties without breeching the privacy of its data and algorithms. Motivated by the algorithm privacy concerns in a distributed computing system, in this paper, we introduce the private function retrieval (PFR) problem, where a user wishes to efficiently retrieve a linear function of $K$ messages from $N$ non-communicating replicated servers while keeping the function hidden from each individual server. The goal is to find a scheme with minimum communication cost. To characterize the fundamental limits of the communication cost, we define the capacity of PFR problem as the size of the message that can be privately retrieved (which is the size of one file) normalized to the required downloaded information bits. We first show that for the PFR problem with $K$ messages, $N=2$ servers and a linear function with binary coefficients the capacity is $C=\frac{1}{2}\Big(1-\frac{1}{2^K}\Big)^{-1}$. Interestingly, this is the capacity of retrieving one of $K$ messages from $N=2$ servers while keeping the index of the requested message hidden from each individual server, the problem known as private information retrieval (PIR). Then, we extend the proposed achievable scheme to the case of arbitrary number of servers and coefficients in the field $GF(q)$ with arbitrary $q$ and obtain $R=\Big(1-\frac{1}{N}\Big)\Big(1+\frac{\frac{1}{N-1}}{(\frac{q^K-1}{q-1})^{N-1}}\Big)$.

Amir Hossein Hadavi, Narges Kazempour, Mahtab Mirmohseni et al.

In this paper, an extended large wireless network under the secrecy constraint is considered. In contrast to works which use idealized assumptions, a more realistic network situation with unknown eavesdroppers locations is investigated: the legitimate users only know their own Channel State Information (CSI), not the eavesdroppers CSI. Also, the network is analyzed by taking in to account the effects of both fading and path loss. Under these assumptions, a power efficient cooperative scheme, named \emph{stochastic virtual beamforming}, is proposed. Applying this scheme, an unbounded secure rate with any desired outage level is achieved, provided that the density of the legitimate users tends to infinity. In addition, by tending the legitimate users density to the infinity, the tolerable density of eavesdroppers will become unbounded too.

Seyed Salman Sajjadi Ghaemmaghami, Afrooz Haghbin, Mahtab Mirmohseni

Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) is a pioneer technology which has depicted a new lifestyle for humanity in all around the world. Every day we observe an increase in the scope of RFID applications and no one cannot withdraw its numerous usage around him/herself. An important issue which should be considered is providing privacy and security requirements of an RFID system. Recently in 2014, Cai et al. proposed two improved RFID authentication protocols based on R-RAPS rules by the names of IHRMA and I2SRS. In this paper, we investigate the privacy of the aforementioned protocols based on Ouafi and Phan formal privacy model and show that both IHRMA and I2SRS protocols cannot provide private authentication for RFID users. Moreover, we showthat these protocols are vulnerable to impersonation, DoS and traceability attacks. Then, by considering the drawbacks of the studied protocols and implementation of messages with new structures, we present two improved efficient and secure authentication protocols to ameliorate the performance of Cai et al schemes. Our analysis illustrate that the existing weaknesses of the discussed protocols are eliminated in our proposed protocols.

Seyed Salman Sajjadi Ghaemmaghami, Mahtab Mirmohseni, Afrooz Haghbin

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a modern communication technology, which provides authentication and identification through a nonphysical contact. Recently, the use of this technology is almost developed in healthcare environments. Although RFID technology can prepare sagacity in systems, privacy and security issues ought to be considered before. Recently, in 2015, Li et al. proposed SRTA, a hash-based RFID authentication protocol in medication verification for healthcare. In this paper, we study this protocol and show that SRTA protocol is vulnerable to traceability, impersonation and Dos attacks. So it does not provide the privacy and security of RFID end users. Therefore, we propose an improved secure and efficient RFID authentication protocol to enhance the performance of Li et al. method. Our analyze show that the existing weaknesses of SRTA protocol are eliminated in our proposed protocol.

Mahtab Mirmohseni, Panagiotis Papadimitratos

We investigate the problem of reliable communication in the presence of active adversaries that can tamper with the transmitted data. We consider a legitimate transmitter-receiver pair connected over multiple communication paths (routes). We propose two new models of adversary, a "memoryless" and a "foreseer" adversary. For both models, the adversaries are placing themselves arbitrarily on the routes, keeping their placement fixed throughout the transmission block. This placement may or may not be known to the transmitter. The adversaries can choose their best modification strategy to increase the error at the legitimate receiver, subject to a maximum distortion constraint. We investigate the communication rates that can be achieved in the presence of the two types of adversaries and the channel (benign) stochastic behavior. For memoryless adversaries, the capacity is derived. Our method is to use the typical set of the anticipated received signal for all possible adversarial strategies (including their best one) in a compound channel that also captures adversarial placement. For the foreseer adversaries, which have enhanced observation capabilities compared to the memoryless ones, we propose a new coding scheme to guarantee resilience, i.e., recovery of the codeword independently of the adversarial (best) choice. We derive an achievable rate and we propose an upper bound on the capacity. We evaluate our general results for specific cases (e.g., binary symbol replacement or erasing attacks), to gain insights.

Mahtab Mirmohseni, Panagiotis Papadimitratos

We study the secrecy capacity in the vicinity of colluding eavesdroppers. Contrary to the perfect collusion assumption in previous works, our new information-theoretic model considers constraints in collusion. We derive the achievable secure rates (lower bounds on the perfect secrecy capacity), both for the discrete memoryless and Gaussian channels. We also compare the proposed rates to the non-colluding and perfect colluding cases.

Mahtab Mirmohseni, Panagiotis Papadimitratos

We investigate large wireless networks subject to security constraints. In contrast to point-to-point, interference-limited communications considered in prior works, we propose active cooperative relaying based schemes. We consider a network with $n_l$ legitimate nodes, $n_e$ eavesdroppers, and path loss exponent $α\geq 2$. As long as $n_e^2(\log(n_e))^γ=o(n_l)$, for some positive $γ$, we show one can obtain unbounded secure aggregate rate. This means zero-cost secure communication, given fixed total power constraint for the entire network. We achieve this result through (i) the source using Wyner randomized encoder and a serial (multi-stage) block Markov scheme, to cooperate with the relays and (ii) the relays acting as a virtual multi-antenna to apply beamforming against the eavesdroppers. Our simpler parallel (two-stage) relaying scheme can achieve the same unbounded secure aggregate rate when $n_e^{\fracα{2}+1}(\log(n_e))^{γ+δ(\fracα{2}+1)}=o(n_l)$ holds, for some positive $γ,δ$. Finally, we study the improvement (to the detriment of legitimate nodes) the eavesdroppers achieve in terms of the information leakage rate in a large cooperative network in case of collusion. We show that again the zero-cost secure communication is possible, if $n_e^{(2+\frac{2}α)}(\log n_e)^γ=o(n_l)$ holds, for some positive $γ$; i.e., in case of collusion slightly fewer eavesdroppers can be tolerated compared to the non-colluding case.

Mohsen Bahrami, Ali Bereyhi, Mahtab Mirmohseni et al.

In this paper, the problem of secret key agreement in state-dependent multiple access channels with an eavesdropper is studied. For this model, the channel state information is non-causally available at the transmitters; furthermore, a legitimate receiver observes a degraded version of the channel state information. The transmitters can partially cooperate with each other using a conferencing link with a limited rate. In addition, a backward public channel is assumed between the terminals. The problem of secret key sharing consists of two rounds. In the first round, the transmitters wish to share a common key with the legitimate receiver. Lower and upper bounds on the common key capacity are established. In a special case, the capacity of the common key is obtained. In the second round, the legitimate receiver agrees on two independent private keys with the corresponding transmitters using the public channel. Inner and outer bounds on the private key capacity region are characterized. In a special case, the inner bound coincides with the outer bound. We provide some examples to illustrate our results.