A New Metric for Measuring the Security of an Environment: The Secrecy Pressure

Information-theoretical approaches can ensure security regardless of the computational power of the attackers. Requirements for the application of this theory are: 1) assuring an advantage over the eavesdroppers quality of reception and 2) knowing where the eavesdropper is. The traditional metrics are the secrecy capacity or outage, which are both related to the quality of the legitimate link against the eavesdropper link. Our goal is to define a new metric which is characteristic of the security of the surface/environment where the legitimate link is immersed, regardless of the position of the eavesdropping node. The contribution of this paper is twofold: a) a general framework for the derivation of the secrecy capacity of a surface, which takes into account all the parameters that influence the secrecy capacity, and b) the definition of a new metric to measure the secrecy of a surface: the secrecy pressure. The metric can be also visualized as a secrecy map, analogously to weather forecast. Different application scenarios are shown: from “forbidden zone” to Gaussian mobility model for the eavesdropper. Moreover, the secrecy outage probability of a surface is derived. This additional metric can measure which is the secrecy rate supportable by the specific environment.