Cooperative Security at the Physical Layer: A Summary of Recent Advances

Wireless communications systems are particularly vulnerable to security attacks because of the inherent openness of the transmission medium. In this article, we focus on guaranteeing confidentiality against eavesdropping attacks where an unauthorized entity aims to intercept an ongoing wireless communication, and we provide a comprehensive summary of recent advances in the area of physical-layer security that guarantees confidentiality by using cooperative techniques unique to the wireless medium. These cooperative techniques consist of carefully designed coding and signaling schemes that are able to harness the properties of the physical layer and to ensure some level of information-theoretic security.