An Electromagnetic Analysis of Noise-Based Intrinsically Secure Communication in Wireless Systems

Recently there has been an increasing interest toward unconditionally secure communication systems in which the mechanism assuring the secrecy of the message is physical and not computational. An interesting approach proposed in the information theory literature for unconditionally secure communication is based on the use of artificial noise at a rate related to the difference between the mutual information in perfect secrecy. Since the mechanism assuring the secrecy of the message is physical and not computational, the unauthorized receiver cannot obtain information from the received signal, regardless of how much computational power is available. For this reason, such a cryptographic system is called unconditionally secure. The aim of this paper is to investigate an electromagnetic approach to the noise-based wireless communication systems stressing the important role of the electromagnetic propagation and antenna design. In particular, the concept of the number of degrees of freedom of the field is used to clarify the physical mechanism that allows for a decrease in the mutual information of the unauthorized channel compared to the eavesdropper channel. Numerical examples regarding both free-space propagation and rich scattering environments are shown, confirming the importance of the role of the electromagnetic propagation and antenna design.