Willie K. Harrison

Benjamin Jensen, Bradford Clark, Dakota Flanary et al.

This paper applies channel sounding measurements to enable physical-layer security coding. The channel measurements were acquired in an indoor environment and used to assess the secrecy capacity as a function of physical location. A variety of Reed-Muller wiretap codes were applied to the channel measurements to determine the most effective code for the environment. The results suggest that deploying physical-layer security coding is a three-point design process, where channel sounding data guides 1) the physical placement of the antennas, 2) the power settings of the transmitter, and 3) the selection of wiretap coding.

Willie K. Harrison, Dinis Sarmento, João P. Vilela et al.

In this paper we provide secrecy metrics applicable to physical-layer coding techniques with finite blocklengths over Gaussian and fading wiretap channel models. Our metrics go beyond some of the known practical secrecy measures, such as bit error rate and security gap, so as to make lower bound probabilistic guarantees on error rates over short blocklengths both preceding and following a secrecy decoder. Our techniques are especially useful in cases where application of traditional information-theoretic security measures is either impractical or simply not yet understood. The metrics can aid both practical system analysis, and practical system design for physical-layer security codes. Furthermore, these new measures fill a void in the current landscape of practical security measures for physical-layer security coding, and may assist in the wide-scale adoption of physical-layer techniques for security in real-world systems. We also show how the new metrics provide techniques for reducing realistic channel models to simpler discrete memoryless wiretap channel equivalents over which existing secrecy code designs may achieve information-theoretic security.