arXiv subjects

Xiaohong Jiang

Publications and source records attributed to Xiaohong Jiang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

On a General Theoretical Framework for Radio Frequency Fingerprint-Based Authentication

While radio frequency fingerprint (RFF)-based wireless device authentication has been widely studied across different datasets and scenarios, there still lacks a fundamental theory to explain why and how RFF can serve as a reliable device identity, significantly hindering the practical application of such an authentication technology. In this article, we integrate the RFF modeling with authentication property analysis to propose a general theoretical framework to facilitate the development of such a theory. The RFF modeling process reveals how RFFs are induced, evolved and observed along the transmitter-channel-receiver chain, built upon which, the authentication property analysis process then outlines how the trustworthiness of an RFF should be examined in terms of its uniqueness, stability, distinguishability, and unforgeability. By linking the RFF formation/evolution to these authentication properties, the framework offers a solid foundation for understanding why and how RFF-based authentication is trustworthy in practice. We also discuss the communication-authentication co-design issue based on the theoretical insights from the proposed framework.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

GLST: Defending Confidence-Driven V2X Collaborative Perception Against Stealthy Multi-Attacker Feature Injection

Collaborative perception (CP) improves autonomous-driving perception by enabling connected vehicles to exchange intermediate features via V2X. Confidence-driven sparse communication reduces bandwidth by transmitting only perception-critical spatial regions, but creates a security risk: once a collaborator is compromised, malicious features in high-confidence or ego-uncertain regions may be preferentially selected and amplified during fusion. Using Where2comm as a representative framework, we show that the proposed Pretend Benign attack exploits its spatial-confidence mechanism by injecting stealthy perturbations into uncertain yet perception-critical regions, substantially degrading 3D object detection while preserving benign-like feature characteristics. Beyond this attack-framework pair, we identify a broader weakness of existing trust-based defenses: their reliance primarily on a single consistency signal leaves them vulnerable when multiple attackers form a pseudo-consensus that biases trust estimation. We therefore propose Global-Local Structural Trust (GLST), a lightweight defense that assesses collaborator reliability through three complementary perspectives: global feature consistency, multi-scale local residual consistency, and structural consistency with ego-side semantic topology. The resulting trust scores guide feature fusion to suppress unreliable collaborators. Experiments on OPV2V show that GLST achieves competitive performance against single-attacker Pretend Benign attacks and substantially stronger robustness in multi-attacker settings. Under a four-attacker Pretend Benign attack, GLST maintains 0.69 AP@0.3, whereas existing single-signal defenses degrade severely. GLST also remains effective against gradient-based attacks such as PGD, indicating that multi-level trust modeling is essential for securing confidence-driven CP.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

On Achievable Covert Communication Performance under CSI Estimation Error and Feedback Delay

Covert communication's effectiveness critically depends on precise channel state information (CSI). This paper investigates the impact of imperfect CSI on achievable covert communication performance in a two-hop relay system. Firstly, we introduce a two-hop covert transmission scheme utilizing channel inversion power control (CIPC) to manage opportunistic interference, eliminating the receiver's self-interference. Given that CSI estimation error (CEE) and feedback delay (FD) are the two primary factors leading to imperfect CSI, we construct a comprehensive theoretical model to accurately characterize their effects on CSI quality. With the aid of this model, we then derive closed-form solutions for detection error probability (DEP) and covert rate (CR), establishing an analytical framework to delineate the inherent relationship between CEE, FD, and covert performance. Furthermore, to mitigate the adverse effects of imperfect CSI on achievable covert performance, we investigate the joint optimization of channel inversion power and data symbol length to maximize CR under DEP constraints and propose an iterative alternating algorithm to solve the bi-dimensional non-convex optimization problem. Finally, extensive experimental results validate our theoretical framework and illustrate the impact of imperfect CSI on achievable covert performance.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2026

Optimal Beamforming for Uplink Covert Communication in MIMO GEO Satellite-Terrestrial Systems

This paper investigates the uplink covert communication in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) satellite-terrestrial system consisting of an Earth station transmitter Alice, a geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO) satellite receiver Bob, and multiple GEO satellite wardens around Bob, where each node in the system is equipped with an array of directional antennas. Based on beamforming and the default antenna orientation setting, we first propose a scheme for covert Alice-Bob uplink transmission. Under the perfect channel estimation scenario, we provide theoretical modeling for the system performance in terms of detection error probability (DEP), transmission outage probability (TOP) and covert rate (CR), and then explore the optimal beamforming (OB) design as well as the joint optimal beamforming and antenna orientation (JO-BA) design for CR maximization. We then extend our study to the imperfect channel estimation scenario, and conduct related performance modeling and OB/JO-BA designs for CR maximization. We also apply the techniques of semidefinite relaxation, alternating optimization, Rodrigues' rotation formula and 1-D search algorithm to develop efficient algorithms to solve the above optimization problems. Finally, extensive numerical results are presented to verify our theoretical results and to illustrate the efficiency of beamforming and antenna orientation design for supporting the uplink covert communication in MIMO GEO satellite-terrestrial systems.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2025

CovertAuth: Joint Covert Communication and Authentication in MmWave Systems

Beam alignment (BA) is a crucial process in millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications, enabling precise directional transmission and efficient link establishment. However, due to characteristics like omnidirectional exposure and the broadcast nature of the BA phase, it is particularly vulnerable to eavesdropping and identity impersonation attacks. To this end, this paper proposes a novel secure framework named CovertAuth, designed to enhance the security of the BA phase against such attacks. In particular, to combat eavesdropping attacks, the closed-form expressions of successful BA probability and covert transmission rate are first derived. Then, a covert communication problem aimed at jointly optimizing beam training budget and transmission power is formulated to maximize covert communication rate, subject to the covertness requirement. An alternating optimization algorithm combined with successive convex approximation is employed to iteratively achieve optimal results. To combat impersonation attacks, the mutual coupling effect of antenna array impairments is explored as a device feature to design a weighted-sum energy detector based physical layer authentication scheme. Moreover, theoretical models for authentication metrics like detection and false alarm probabilities are also provided to conduct performance analysis. Based on these models, an optimization problem is constructed to determine the optimal weight value that maximizes authentication accuracy. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that CovertAuth presents improved detection accuracy under the same covertness requirement compared to existing works.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Enhancing Covert Communication in Relay Systems Using Multi-Antenna Technique

This paper exploits the multi-antenna technique to enhance the covert communication performance in a relay system, where a source S conducts covert communication with a destination D via a relay R, subjecting to the detections of transmissions in the two hops from a single-antenna warden W. To demonstrate the performance gain from adopting the multi-antenna technique, we first consider the scenario when S, R and D all adopt single antenna, and apply hypothesis testing and statistics theories to develop a theoretical framework for the covert performance modeling in terms of detection error probability (DEP) and covert throughput. We then consider the scenario when S, R and D all adopt multiple antennas, and apply the hypothesis testing, statistics and matrix theories to develop corresponding theoretical framework for performance modeling. We further explore the optimal designs of the target rate and transmit power for covert throughput maximization under above both scenarios, subjecting to the constraints of covertness, reliability and transmit power. To solve the optimization problems, we employ Karushi-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions method in the single antenna scenario and a search algorithm in the multi-antenna scenario. Finally, we provide extensive numerical results to illustrate how the multi-antenna technique can enhance the covert performance in two-hop relay systems.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

SoK: Comparing Different Membership Inference Attacks with a Comprehensive Benchmark

Membership inference (MI) attacks threaten user privacy through determining if a given data example has been used to train a target model. However, it has been increasingly recognized that the "comparing different MI attacks" methodology used in the existing works has serious limitations. Due to these limitations, we found (through the experiments in this work) that some comparison results reported in the literature are quite misleading. In this paper, we seek to develop a comprehensive benchmark for comparing different MI attacks, called MIBench, which consists not only the evaluation metrics, but also the evaluation scenarios. And we design the evaluation scenarios from four perspectives: the distance distribution of data samples in the target dataset, the distance between data samples of the target dataset, the differential distance between two datasets (i.e., the target dataset and a generated dataset with only nonmembers), and the ratio of the samples that are made no inferences by an MI attack. The evaluation metrics consist of ten typical evaluation metrics. We have identified three principles for the proposed "comparing different MI attacks" methodology, and we have designed and implemented the MIBench benchmark with 84 evaluation scenarios for each dataset. In total, we have used our benchmark to fairly and systematically compare 15 state-of-the-art MI attack algorithms across 588 evaluation scenarios, and these evaluation scenarios cover 7 widely used datasets and 7 representative types of models. All codes and evaluations of MIBench are publicly available at https://github.com/MIBench/MIBench.github.io/blob/main/README.md.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

Cooperative Jamming and Relay Selection for Covert Communications

This paper investigates the covert communications via cooperative jamming and relay selection in a wireless relay system, where a source intends to transmit a message to its destination with the help of a selected relay, and a warden attempts to detect the existence of wireless transmissions from both the source and relay, while friendly jammers send jamming signals to prevent warden from detecting the transmission process. To this end, we first propose two relay selection schemes, namely random relay selection (RRS) and max-min relay selection (MMRS), as well as their corresponding cooperative jamming (CJ) schemes for ensuring covertness in the system. We then provide theoretical modeling for the covert rate performance under each relay selection scheme and its CJ scheme and further explore the optimal transmit power controls of both the source and relay for covert rate maximization. Finally, extensive simulation/numerical results are presented to validate our theoretical models and also to illustrate the covert rate performance of the relay system under cooperative jamming and relay selection.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2023

Covert Communication in Hybrid Microwave/mmWave A2G Systems with Transmission Mode Selection

This paper investigates the covert communication in an air-to-ground (A2G) system, where a UAV (Alice) can adopt the omnidirectional microwave (OM) or directional mmWave (DM) transmission mode to transmit covert data to a ground user (Bob) while suffering from the detection of an adversary (Willie). For both the OM and DM modes, we first conduct theoretical analysis to reveal the inherent relationship between the transmit rate/transmit power and basic covert performance metrics in terms of detection error probability (DEP), effective covert rate (ECR), and covert Shannon capacity (CSC). To facilitate the transmission mode selection at Alice, we then explore the optimization of transmit rate and transmit power for ECR/CSC maximization under the OM and DM modes, and further propose a hybrid OM/DM transmission mode which allows the UAV to adaptively select between the OM and DM modes to achieve the maximum ECR and CSC at a given location of UAV. Finally, extensive numerical results are provided to illustrate the covert performances of the concerned A2G system under different transmission modes, and demonstrate that the hybrid OM/DM transmission mode outperforms the pure OM or DM mode in terms of covert performance.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

Opportunistic Wiretapping/Jamming: A New Attack Model in Millimeter-Wave Wireless Networks

While the millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication is robust against the conventional wiretapping attack due to its short transmission range and directivity, this paper proposes a new opportunistic wiretapping and jamming (OWJ) attack model in mmWave wireless networks. With OWJ, an eavesdropper can opportunistically conduct wiretapping or jamming to initiate a more hazardous attack based on the instantaneous costs of wiretapping and jamming. We also provide three realizations of the OWJ attack, which are mainly determined by the cost models relevant to distance, path loss and received power, respectively. To understand the impact of the new attack on mmWave network security, we first develop novel approximation techniques to characterize the irregular distributions of wiretappers, jammers and interferers under three OWJ realizations. With the help of the results of node distributions, we then derive analytical expressions for the secrecy transmission capacity to depict the network security performance under OWJ. Finally, we provide extensive numerical results to illustrate the effect of OWJ and to demonstrate that the new attack can more significantly degrade the network security performance than the pure wiretapping or jamming attack.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2022

Entropy Enhanced Multi-Agent Coordination Based on Hierarchical Graph Learning for Continuous Action Space

In most existing studies on large-scale multi-agent coordination, the control methods aim to learn discrete policies for agents with finite choices. They rarely consider selecting actions directly from continuous action spaces to provide more accurate control, which makes them unsuitable for more complex tasks. To solve the control issue due to large-scale multi-agent systems with continuous action spaces, we propose a novel MARL coordination control method that derives stable continuous policies. By optimizing policies with maximum entropy learning, agents improve their exploration in execution and acquire an excellent performance after training. We also employ hierarchical graph attention networks (HGAT) and gated recurrent units (GRU) to improve the scalability and transferability of our method. The experiments show that our method consistently outperforms all baselines in large-scale multi-agent cooperative reconnaissance tasks.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2021

Soft Hierarchical Graph Recurrent Networks for Many-Agent Partially Observable Environments

The recent progress in multi-agent deep reinforcement learning(MADRL) makes it more practical in real-world tasks, but its relatively poor scalability and the partially observable constraints raise challenges to its performance and deployment. Based on our intuitive observation that the human society could be regarded as a large-scale partially observable environment, where each individual has the function of communicating with neighbors and remembering its own experience, we propose a novel network structure called hierarchical graph recurrent network(HGRN) for multi-agent cooperation under partial observability. Specifically, we construct the multi-agent system as a graph, use the hierarchical graph attention network(HGAT) to achieve communication between neighboring agents, and exploit GRU to enable agents to record historical information. To encourage exploration and improve robustness, we design a maximum-entropy learning method to learn stochastic policies of a configurable target action entropy. Based on the above technologies, we proposed a value-based MADRL algorithm called Soft-HGRN and its actor-critic variant named SAC-HRGN. Experimental results based on three homogeneous tasks and one heterogeneous environment not only show that our approach achieves clear improvements compared with four baselines, but also demonstrates the interpretability, scalability, and transferability of the proposed model. Ablation studies prove the function and necessity of each component.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Achieving Covertness and Secrecy: A New Paradigm for Secure Wireless Communication

This paper explores a new secure wireless communication paradigm where the physical layer security technology is applied to counteract both the detection and eavesdropping attacks, such that the critical covertness and secrecy properties of the communication are jointly guaranteed. We first provide theoretical modeling for covertness outage probability (COP), secrecy outage probability (SOP) and transmission probability (TP) to depict the covertness, secrecy and transmission performances of the paradigm. To understand the fundamental security performance under the new paradigm, we then define a new metric - covert secrecy rate (CSR), which characterizes the maximum transmission rate subject to the constraints of COP, SOP and TP. We further conduct detailed theoretical analysis to identify the CSR under various scenarios determined by the detector-eavesdropper relationships and the secure transmission schemes adopted by transmitters. Finally, numerical results are provided to illustrate the achievable performances under the new secure communication paradigm.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2020

Secure Millimeter-Wave Ad Hoc Communications Using Physical Layer Security

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications are highly promising to improve the capacity of modern wireless networks, while the physical layer security (PLS) techniques hold great potential to enhance the critical secrecy performance therein. By carefully exploiting the significant signal difference between the Non-Light-of-Sight (NLoS) and Line-of-Sight (LoS) mmWave links, this paper proposes a Sight-based Cooperative Jamming (SCJ) scheme to improve the PLS performance of mmWave ad hoc communications. In this scheme, each potential jammer that has no LoS link to its nearest receiver but may have LoS links to eavesdroppers is selected with a certain probability to generate artificial noise such that channel advantages at legitimate receivers can be achieved. For performance modeling of the new jamming scheme, novel and efficient theoretical approximation approaches are firstly developed to enable the challenging issue of interference distribution modeling to be tackled, and then a theoretical framework based on stochastic geometry is proposed to capture the secrecy transmission capacity behavior under the SCJ scheme. Finally, extensive numerical results are provided to illustrate the SCJ scheme under various network scenarios.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2018

Link Selection for Secure Cooperative Networks with Buffer-Aided Relaying

This paper investigates the secure communication in a two-hop cooperative wireless network, where a buffer-aided relay is utilized to forward data from the source to destination, and a passive eavesdropper attempts to intercept data transmission from both the source and relay. Depending on the availability of instantaneous channel state information of the source, two cases of transmission mechanisms, i.e., adaptive-rate transmission and fixed-rate transmission are considered. To enhance the security of the system, novel link selection policies are proposed for both cases to select source-to-relay, relay-to-destination, or no link transmission based on the channels qualities. Closed-form expressions are derived for the end-to-end secrecy outage probability (SOP), secrecy outage capacity (SOC), and exact secrecy throughput (EST), respectively. Furthermore, we prove the condition that EST reaches its maximum, and explore how to minimize the SOP and maximize the SOC by optimizing the link selection parameters. Finally, simulations are conducted to demonstrate the validity of our theoretical performance evaluation, and extensive numerical results are provided to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed link selection polices for the secure communication in two-hop cooperative networks.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2018

Smart Contract-Based Access Control for the Internet of Things

This paper investigates a critical access control issue in the Internet of Things (IoT). In particular, we propose a smart contract-based framework, which consists of multiple access control contracts (ACCs), one judge contract (JC) and one register contract (RC), to achieve distributed and trustworthy access control for IoT systems. Each ACC provides one access control method for a subject-object pair, and implements both static access right validation based on predefined policies and dynamic access right validation by checking the behavior of the subject. The JC implements a misbehavior-judging method to facilitate the dynamic validation of the ACCs by receiving misbehavior reports from the ACCs, judging the misbehavior and returning the corresponding penalty. The RC registers the information of the access control and misbehavior-judging methods as well as their smart contracts, and also provides functions (e.g., register, update and delete) to manage these methods. To demonstrate the application of the framework, we provide a case study in an IoT system with one desktop computer, one laptop and two Raspberry Pi single-board computers, where the ACCs, JC and RC are implemented based on the Ethereum smart contract platform to achieve the access control.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2018

Mode Selection and Spectrum Partition for D2D Inband Communications: A Physical Layer Security Perspective

This paper investigates from the physical layer security (PLS) perspective the fundamental issues of mode selection and spectrum partition in cellular networks with inband device-to-device (D2D) communication. We consider a mode selection scheme allowing each D2D pair to probabilistically switch between the underlay and overlay modes, and also a spectrum partition scheme where the system spectrum is orthogonally partitioned between cellular and overlay D2D communications. We first develop a general theoretical framework to model both the secrecy outage/secrecy capacity performance of cellular users and outage/capacity performance of D2D pairs, and to conduct performance optimization to identify the optimal mode selection and spectrum partition for secrecy capacity maximization and secrecy outage probability minimization. A case study is then provided to demonstrate the application of our theoretical framework for performance modeling and optimization, and also to illustrate the impacts of mode selection and spectrum partition on the PLS performances of inband D2D communications.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2017

On Performance Modeling for MANETs under General Limited Buffer Constraint

Understanding the real achievable performance of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) under practical network constraints is of great importance for their applications in future highly heterogeneous wireless network environments. This paper explores, for the first time, the performance modeling for MANETs under a general limited buffer constraint, where each network node maintains a limited source buffer of size $B_s$ to store its locally generated packets and also a limited shared relay buffer of size $B_r$ to store relay packets for other nodes. Based on the Queuing theory and birth-death chain theory, we first develop a general theoretical framework to fully depict the source/relay buffer occupancy process in such a MANET, which applies to any distributed MAC protocol and any mobility model that leads to the uniform distribution of nodes' locations in steady state. With the help of this framework, we then derive the exact expressions of several key network performance metrics, including achievable throughput, throughput capacity, and expected end-to-end delay. We further conduct case studies under two network scenarios and provide the corresponding theoretical/simulation results to demonstrate the application as well as the efficiency of our theoretical framework. Finally, we present extensive numerical results to illustrate the impacts of buffer constraint on the performance of a buffer-limited MANET.

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