Using Perfect Codes in Relay Aided Networks: A Security Analysis

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are state-of-the-art communication environments that offer various applications with distinct requirements. However, security in CPS is a non-negotiable concept, since without a proper security mechanism the applications of CPS may risk human lives, the privacy of individuals, and system operations. In this paper, we focus on PHY-layer security approaches in CPS to prevent passive eavesdropping attacks, and we propose an integration of physical layer operations to enhance security. Thanks to the McEliece cryptosystem, error injection is firstly applied to information bits, which are encoded with the forward error correction (FEC) schemes. Golay and Hamming codes are selected as FEC schemes to satisfy power and computational efficiency. Then obtained codewords are transmitted across reliable intermediate relays to the legitimate receiver. As a performance metric, the decoding frame error rate of the eavesdropper is analytically obtained for the fragmentary existence of significant noise between relays and Eve. The simulation results validate the analytical calculations, and the obtained results show that the number of low-quality channels and the selected FEC scheme affects the performance of the proposed model.