Secure UAV Communications by STEEP Against Full-Duplex Active Eavesdropper

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) assisted wireless communication has emerged as a highly promising element in the landscape of future wireless networks. This paper investigates the application of “Secret-message Transmission by Echoing Encrypted Probes (STEEP)” to secure UAV communications between a ground station (Alice) and a UAV (Bob). Even with the presence of strong jamming from a full-duplex eavesdropper (Eve), STEEP shows resilience and maintains a strong positive secrecy rate in bits per channel use in every channel coherence period as long as Eve's observations during the probing phase of STEEP are not noiseless. STEEP is a novel round-trip transmission scheme for secure communications, overcoming limitations where prior schemes fail to achieve a positive secrecy rate when Eve's receive channel is stronger than users'.