Physical Layer Security for Computation Over Unreliable Transmission Channels

• Applicant: Dr.-Ing. Mario Goldenbaum
• Subject Area: Electronic Semiconductors, Components and Circuits, Integrated Systems, Sensor Technology, Theoretical Electrical Engineering
• Term: from 2015 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 280167202

An integral part of nearly every emerging technology such as, for instance, Industry 4.0, Smart Grids, 5G, Tactile Internet, Mobile Crowd Sensing, eHealth, will be the reliable, efficient, and especially secure computation of functions that depend on the data available at spatially distributed terminals/agents. Functions of interest can be, for instance, the maximum flue gas concentration in a building for fire detection, the maximum frequency drift in a Smart Grid, the average noise level in an urban area by means of Mobile Crowd Sensing, the optimal resource allocation in a 5G mobile network, or the controller output in a networked control system. Compared with existing network solutions, this will result in a paradigm shift as the efficient transmission of raw data is no longer of highest priority. There are many ongoing research activities in the area of distributed computation over communication channels and networks as well as in the area of secure multi-party computation. With regard to the latter, almost all published results are from a standard cryptographic perspective while only very few works exist that follow a physical layer security approach (i.e., Shannon approach). These few works, however, consistently assume that the communication between any given pair of transmitters and receivers is separated in time or frequency and takes place over a noiseless channel of unlimited capacity. Thus, the communication plays only a very minor role in the design of security protocols. For any practical relevant computation scheme, these are too idealistic assumptions as in addition to the security requirements, each terminal also has to deal with noise, channel fluctuations, and communication constraints such as limited power and bandwidth. As a consequence, the fundamental information theoretic limits of reliably and efficiently computing functions over unreliable channels under additional secrecy constraints are still unknown. The lack of fundamental limits prevents a thorough understanding of the existing trade-offs, which is indispensable for deriving conditions under which secure computation over noisy channels is possible. As untrusted or even corrupted computation results can have catastrophic consequences in each of the above-mentioned technologies, the main goal of this research fellowship is to provide the first elements of an information theoretic foundation of distributed computation over unreliable transmission channels. Based on this, optimal strategies will be derived and its performance analyzed.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: USA
• Host: Professor H. Vincent Poor, Ph.D.