PHYSICAL-LAYER SECURITY FOR AERONAUTICAL TELEMETRY

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the application of physical-layer security coding for next generation aeronautical telemetry communication systems. The coding we refer to is similar to error-control coding, but the codes are deployed for two purposes: to achieve reliable communications, and to achieve secure communications. We consider a single eavesdropper on an air-to-ground aeronautical telemetry link, and show how the overhead measured by the rate of the code can be used to keep secrets from eavesdroppers over noisy channels, rather than recover from channel errors. We show simple examples that work over erasure channels to achieve a security constraint, and then consider approaches to more practical coding constructions for Gaussian channels that satisfies both reliability and security constraints on the network.