Reconfigurable Convolutional Codec for Physical Layer Communication Security Application

Wireless communication is an indispensable tool in our daily life. Due to the open nature of wireless channels, wireless communication is more vulnerable to attacks than wired communication. Security is paramount in wireless communication to overcome these attacks. A reconfigurable convolutional encoder/decoder based physical layer security mechanism, named ReConv, is proposed in this paper. ReConv provides an extra level of security at the physical level by dynamically updating base band convolution parameters. ReConv can interleave secure packets along with normal unsecure packets to hide the secure information. An eavesdropper will see the packets with changed convolution parameters as packets containing errors and will drop them. However, the rightful receiver will be able to decode the secure packets without error. Since the secure packets are dropped at the eavesdropper´s physical layer, there will be no further processing of the secure packets by the eavesdropper. ReConv allows the use of 63.5 billions differing convolution parameter combinations and the attacking complexity will increase exponentially with the extended byte-level ReConv and fake CRC solutions. Meanwhile, the low hardware overhead of ReConv makes it a low cost solution to enable greater security in wireless communication. Furthermore, the orthogonal relationship between ReConv and existing security algorithms such as AES, makes it easy to integrate ReConv to existing wireless systems.