LAUSR

We investigate the physical-layer security of uplink single-carrier frequency-division multiple-access (SC-FDMA) systems. Multiple users, Alices, send confidential messages to a common legitimate base-station, Bob, in the presence of an eavesdropper, Eve. To secure the legitimate transmissions, each user superimposes an artificial noise (AN) signal on the time-domain SC-FDMA data symbol. We reduce the computational and storage requirements at Bob’s receiver by assuming simple per-sub-channel detectors. We assume that Eve has global channel knowledge of all links in addition to high computational capabilities, where she adopts high-complexity detectors such as single-user maximum likelihood (ML), multi-user minimum-mean-square-error, and multi-user ML. We analyze the correlation properties of the time-domain AN signal and illustrate how Eve can exploit them to reduce the AN effects. We prove that the number of useful AN streams that can degrade Eve’s signal-to-noise ratio is dependent on the channel memories of Alices–Bob and Alices–Eve links. Furthermore, we enhance the system security for the case of partial Alices–Bob channel knowledge at Eve, where Eve only knows the precoding matrices of the data and AN signals instead of knowing the entire Alices–Bob channel matrices, and propose a hybrid security scheme that integrates temporal AN with channel-based secret key extraction.