Abstract

The resurgence of physical-layer security, after early contributions from the seventies stemming from information-theoretic security concepts, is tied to recent advances on wireless networks. While some works have looked at the effect of intrinsic wireless phenomena, such as fading, on the secrecy level of these networks, other works consider active approaches whereby cooperative users (e.g. relays or jammers) are used to improve security. In particular, otherwise silent devices can be selected as friendly jammers to improve secrecy, by causing interference to adversaries. In this talk, after introducing the fundamentals of wireless physical-layer security, we present techniques for selecting jammers with security concerns and show how to combine those jamming techniques with coding methodologies to amplify the effect of jamming for secrecy, while reducing the associated energy cost.

Bio: João P. Vilela is an assistant professor at the Department of Informatics Engineering of the University of Coimbra and a senior researcher at the Laboratory of Communications and Telematics of the Centre for Informatics and Systems of the University of Coimbra. He received the Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2011 from the University of Porto, Portugal, period during which he was visiting the Coding, Communications and Information Theory group at Georgia Tech, working on physical-layer security, and the Network Coding and Reliable Communications group at MIT , working on security for network coding. In recent years, Dr. Vilela has been coordinator and team member of several national, bilateral, and European-funded projects in security and privacy of computer and communication systems, with focus on wireless networks, mobile devices and cloud computing. Other research interests include anticipatory networks and intelligent transportation systems.