Polar Coding for Physical-layer Security without Knowledge of the Eavesdropper's Channel

We propose an adaptive secrecy scheme using polar codes with random frozen bits for a general wiretap channel, in which to protect the data from a potential eavesdropper, part or all of the frozen bits are randomly generated per message. To assess the secrecy level of the proposed scheme, three types of decoding strategies are evaluated: a matching decoder which knows the positions of all inserted bits inside the blocklength and tries to estimate them using the same decoding techniques, a blind decoder which treats all the frozen bits as the same value, and a random decoder which considers those dynamic bits as random at the receiver. Results are presented in terms of the system security gap, assuming an adaptive decoding strategy. It is shown that the system achieves combined secrecy and reliability. The proposed scheme does not assume knowledge of the eavesdropper's channel when defining the indices of information and frozen bits.