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With the inherent advantages of exceptional maneuverability, flexible deployment options and cost-effectiveness, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) present themselves as a viable solution for providing aerial communication services to Internet of Things devices in high-traffic or remote areas. Nevertheless, the openness of the air–ground channel poses significant security challenges to UAV-based wireless systems. In this paper, a UAV-assisted secure communication system model is established based on non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) from the perspective of physical layer security, aiming to conceal the transmission behavior between UAVs and legitimate users (LUs). Specifically, a mobile UAV assumes the role of an aerial base station, leveraging NOMA technique to transmit data to LUs while evading detection from mobile eavesdropper situated on the ground. To fortify the security performance of the system, a hovering UAV acts as a friendly jammer and transmits interference signals to mobile eavesdropper (referred to as Eve). The objective of this scheme is to maximize the minimum average secure rate of all LUs by meticulously optimizing the trajectory and power allocation of the mobile UAV, subject to secrecy performance constraints. The highly interdependent and non-convex nature of this optimization problem renders direct solutions infeasible. Hence, this paper designs an efficient iterative algorithm that decouples the original problem into two subproblems, enabling an alternating optimization process for the trajectory and power allocation of the mobile UAV until the convergence of the objective function is achieved. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm effectively improves the minimum average secure rate of all LUs compared with the benchmark scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers secure communications for an underlay cognitive radio network (CRN) in the presence of an external eavesdropper (Eve). The secrecy performance of CRNs is usually limited by the primary receiver's interference power constraint. To overcome this issue, we propose to use an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as a friendly jammer to interfere Eve in decoding the confidential message from the secondary transmitter. Our goal is to jointly optimize the transmit power and UAV's trajectory in the three-dimensional space to maximize the average achievable secrecy rate of the secondary system. The formulated optimization problem is nonconvex due to the non-convexity of the objective and non-convexity of constraints, which is very challenging to solve. To obtain a suboptimal but efficient solution to the design problem, we first transform it into a more tractable form and then develop an iterative algorithm for its solution by leveraging the inner approximation (IA) framework. Combining tools from IA framework and S-procedure, we further extend the proposed algorithm to a more realistic scenario, where the imperfect location information of ground nodes (including Eve, secondary receiver and primary receiver) is considered, resulting in the average worst-case secrecy rate. Extensive numerical results are provided to demonstrate the merits of the proposed algorithms over existing approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-aided secure communication system is conceived and investigated, where the UAV transmits legitimate information to a ground user in the presence of an eavesdropper (Eve). To guarantee the security, the UAV employs a power splitting approach, where its transmit power can be divided into two parts for transmitting confidential messages and artificial noise (AN), respectively. We aim to maximize the average secrecy rate by jointly optimizing the UAV’s trajectory, the transmit power levels and the corresponding power splitting ratios allocated to different time slots during the whole flight time, subject to both the maximum UAV speed constraint, the total mobility energy constraint, the total transmit power constraint, and other related constraints. To efficiently tackle this non-convex optimization problem, we propose an iterative algorithm by blending the benefits of the block coordinate descent (BCD) method, the concave-convex procedure (CCCP) and the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). Specially, we show that the proposed algorithm exhibits very low computational complexity and each of its updating steps can be formulated in a nearly closed form. Besides, it can be easily extended to the case of three-dimensional (3D) trajectory design. Our simulation results validate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the finite blocklength scenario, which is suitable for practical applications, a method of maximizing the average effective secrecy rate (AESR) is proposed for a UAV-enabled secure communication by optimizing the UAV's trajectory and transmit power subject to the UAV's mobility constraints and transmit power constraints. To address the formulated non-convex optimization problem, it is first decomposed into two non-convex subproblems. Then the two subproblems are converted respectively into two convex subproblems via the first-order approximation. Finally, an alternating iteration algorithm is developed by solving the two subproblems iteratively based on successive convex approximation (SCA) technique. Numerical results show that our proposed scheme can achieve a 6% to 13% improvement on the AESR performance compared with the benchmark schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has been widely applied in internet-of-things (IoT) scenarios while the security for UAV communications remains a challenging problem due to the broadcast nature of the line-of-sight (LoS) wireless channels. This article investigates the security problems for dual UAV-assisted mobile edge computing (MEC) systems, where one UAV is invoked to help the ground terminal devices (TDs) to compute the offloaded tasks and the other one acts as a jammer to suppress the vicious eavesdroppers. In our framework, minimum secure computing capacity maximization problems are proposed for both the time division multiple access (TDMA) scheme and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme by jointly optimizing the communication resources, computation resources, and UAVs’ trajectories. The formulated problems are non-trivial and challenging to be solved due to the highly coupled variables. To tackle these problems, we first transform them into more tractable ones then a block coordinate descent based algorithm and a penalized block coordinate descent based algorithm are proposed to solve the problems for TDMA and NOMA schemes, respectively. Finally, numerical results show that the security computing capacity performance of the systems is enhanced by the proposed algorithms as compared with the benchmarks. Meanwhile, the NOMA scheme is superior to the TDMA scheme for security improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can be utilized as a relay to connect nodes with long distance, which can achieve significant throughput gain owing to its mobility and line-of-sight (LoS) channel with ground nodes. However, such LoS channels make UAV transmission easy to eavesdrop. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme to guarantee the security of UAV-relayed wireless networks with caching via jointly optimizing the UAV trajectory and time scheduling. For every two users that have cached the required file for the other, the UAV broadcasts the files together to these two users, and the eavesdropping can be disrupted. For the users without caching, we maximize their minimum average secrecy rate by jointly optimizing the trajectory and scheduling, with the secrecy rate of the caching users satisfied. The corresponding optimization problem is difficult to solve due to its non-convexity, and we propose an iterative algorithm via successive convex optimization to solve it approximately. Furthermore, we also consider a benchmark scheme in which we maximize the minimum average secrecy rate among all users by jointly optimizing the UAV trajectory and time scheduling when no user has the caching ability. Simulation results are provided to show the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the physical layer security of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) network, where a UAV base station (UAV-B) transmits confidential information to multiple information receivers (IRs) with the aid of a UAV jammer (UAV-J) in the presence of multiple eavesdroppers. We formulate an optimization problem to jointly design the trajectories and transmit power of UAV-B and UAV-J in order to maximize the minimum average secrecy rate over all IRs. The optimization problem is non-convex and the optimization variables are coupled, which leads to the optimization problem being mathematically intractable. As such, we decompose the optimization problem into two subproblems and then solve it by employing an alternating iterative algorithm and the successive convex approximation technique. Our results show that the average secrecy rate performance of the proposed scheme provides about 20% and 150% performance gains over the joint trajectory and transmit power optimization without UAV-J scheme and the transmit power optimization with fixed trajectory scheme at flight period $T=150$  s, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) enabled secure communication systems where a mobile UAV wishes to send confidential messages to multiple ground users. To improve the security performance, a cooperative UAV is additionally considered that transmits the jamming signal. In this system, we maximize the minimum secrecy rate among the ground users by jointly optimizing the trajectory and the transmit power of the UAVs as well as the user scheduling. To efficiently solve this nonconvex problem, we adopt block successive upper bound minimization techniques, which address a sequence of approximated convex problems for each block of variables. Numerical results verify that the proposed algorithm outperforms baseline methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are anticipated to be widely deployed in future wireless communications, due to their advantages of high mobility and easy deployment. However, the broadcast nature of air-to-ground line-of-sight wireless channels brings a new challenge to the information security of UAV-ground communication. This paper tackles such a challenge in the physical layer by exploiting the mobility of UAV via its trajectory design. We consider a UAV-ground communication system with multiple potential eavesdroppers on the ground, where the information on the locations of the eavesdroppers is imperfect. We formulate an optimization problem, which maximizes the average worst case secrecy rate of the system by jointly designing the robust trajectory and transmit power of the UAV over a given flight duration. The nonconvexity of the optimization problem and the imperfect location information of the eavesdroppers make the problem difficult to be solved optimally. We propose an iterative suboptimal algorithm to solve this problem efficiently by applying the block coordinate descent method, $\mathcal {S}$ -procedure, and successive convex optimization method. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can improve the average worst case secrecy rate significantly, as compared to two other benchmark algorithms without robust design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]