Towards Secure Over-The-Air Computation

Abstract: We propose a new method to protect Over-The-Air (OTA) computation schemes against passive eavesdropping. Our method uses a friendly jammer whose signal is -- contrary to common intuition -- stronger at the legitimate receiver than it is at the eavesdropper. We focus on the computation of arithmetic averages over an OTA channel. The derived secrecy guarantee translates to a lower bound on the eavesdropper's mean square error while the question of how to provide operationally more significant guarantees such as semantic security remains open for future work. The key ingredients in proving the security guarantees are a known result on channel resolvability and a generalization of existing achievability results on coding for compound channels.