How Effective is the Artificial Noise? Real-Time Analysis of a PHY Security Scenario

Expanding usage of mobile technologies and devices causes new challenges, especially in terms of security. In the near future, the number of battery powered devices will also significantly increase. Current security approaches are not sufficient for these issues and high-complexity cryptographic techniques are not suitable for such devices. To address these problems, physical layer (PHY) security solutions have recently emerged. Some 5G candidate techniques such as full-duplex communication (FD) and artificial noise transmission (AN) are exploited in various PHY security solutions due to their performance advantages. In this study, a scenario resembling a factory environment is considered and security level is analyzed in real-time by utilizing FD and AN methods. The aim of this analysis is to investigate physically secure transmission regions and to expand these regions by intelligently using AN. Our proposed approach is evaluated in real- time with a testbed that consists of software defined radios (SDRs). Two devices with very different front-end characteristics are utilized as eavesdroppers to analyze hardware effects on the eavesdropping performance. As observed with experiments, robust secure regions can be created by the use of AN on eavesdroppers effectively.