“Information Theoretic Security in Wireless Networks”

Abstract

Security in wireless networks has traditionally been considered to be an issue to be addressed at the higher layers of the network.  However, with the emergence of ad hoc and other less centralized networking architectures, there has been an increase in interest in the potential of the physical layer to provide communications security. Information theory provides a natural framework for the study of this issue. Although the use of information theoretic concepts to characterize communications security dates to Shannon's earliest work, and the important work on the wire-tap channel by Wyner and by Csiszár and Körner in the 1970's addressed security issues for broadcast communications, a comprehensive information-theoretic view of security, particularly for wireless channel models, is not well developed yet. In this talk, I will begin with an introduction of basic ideas of information-theoretic security. I will then present, in detail, one of our recent results on establishing the capacity-equivocation region for a cognitive interference network, which characterizes a fundamental trade-off between reliable communication rates and secrecy. Our result also establishes a new capacity theorem for a class of interference channels (without secrecy constraints). I will also postulate the general design principles that are essential to achieve secure communication and point out a number of directions for research in the future.

Bio

Yingbin Liang received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2005. Since September 2005, she has been working as a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University. Her research interests include wireless communications and networks, information security, and information theory. Dr. Liang was a Vodafone Fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign during 2003-2005, and received the Vodafone-U.S. Foundation Fellows Initiative Research Merit Award in 2005. She also received the M. E. Van Valkenburg Graduate Research Award from the ECE department, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in 2005.