“Larvatus prodeo,” announced René Descartes at the beginning of the seventeenth century: “I come forward, masked.” Deliberately disguising or silencing their most intimate thoughts and emotions, many ...early modern Europeans besides Descartes-princes, courtiers, aristocrats and commoners alike-chose to practice the shadowy art of dissimulation. For men and women who could not risk revealing their inner lives to those around them, this art of incommunicativity was crucial, both personally and politically. Many writers and intellectuals sought to explain, expose, justify, or condemn the emergence of this new culture of secrecy, and from Naples to the Netherlands controversy swirled for two centuries around the powers and limits of dissimulation, whether in affairs of state or affairs of the heart. This beautifully written work crisscrosses Europe, with a special focus on Italy, to explore attitudes toward the art of dissimulation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Discussing many canonical and lesser-known works, Jon R. Snyder examines the treatment of dissimulation in early modern treatises and writings on the court, civility, moral philosophy, political theory, and in the visual arts.
Reimagining transparency and secrecy in the era of
digital data When total data surveillance delimits agency
and revelations of political wrongdoing fail to have consequences,
is transparency the ...social panacea liberal democracies purport it
to be? This book sets forth the provocative argument that
progressive social goals would be better served by a radical form
of secrecy, at least while state and corporate forces hold an
asymmetrical advantage over the less powerful in data control.
Clare Birchall asks: How might transparency actually serve agendas
that are far from transparent? Can we imagine a secrecy that could
act in the service of, rather than against, a progressive
politics?
To move beyond atomizing calls for privacy and to interrupt the
perennial tension between state security and the public's right to
know, Birchall adapts Édouard Glissant's thinking to propose a
digital "right to opacity." As a crucial element of radical
secrecy, she argues, this would eventually give rise to a
"postsecret" society, offering an understanding and experience of
the political that is free from the false choice between secrecy
and transparency. She grounds her arresting story in case studies
including the varied presidential styles of George W. Bush, Barack
Obama, and Donald Trump; the Snowden revelations; conspiracy
theories espoused or endorsed by Trump; WikiLeaks and guerrilla
transparency; and the opening of the state through data
portals.
Postsecrecy is the necessary condition for imagining, finally,
an alternative vision of "the good," of equality, as neither shaped
by neoliberal incarnations of transparency nor undermined by secret
state surveillance. Not least, postsecrecy reimagines collective
resistance in the era of digital data.
Increasing concerns regarding wireless systems' security are leading researchers to exploit the physical properties of a medium while designing any secured wireless network. The secrecy performance ...of a mixed radio frequency-free space optical (RF-FSO) system with a variable gain relaying scheme is investigated in this paper under the attempt of wiretapping by an eavesdropper. We assume that the eavesdropper can intrude the target data from the RF link only. Both the RF links (main and eavesdropper) undergo the <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">\alpha -\mu </tex-math></inline-formula> fading statistics and the FSO link experiences the exponentiated Weibull fading statistics. Exploiting the amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying scheme while considering two detection techniques (i.e. heterodyne detection and intensity modulation/direct detection) with pointing error impairments, the mathematical formulations of the unified probability density function and cumulative distribution function are performed for the equivalent signal-to-noise ratio of the considered dual-hop RF-FSO link. Closed-form analytical expressions for average secrecy capacity, secrecy outage probability, and the probability of non-zero secrecy capacity are derived in terms of Meijer's <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">G </tex-math></inline-formula> and Fox's <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">H </tex-math></inline-formula> functions to quantify the system performance. Capitalizing on these expressions, the secrecy performance is further analyzed for various channel parameters of RF links, aperture sizes of the receiver, pointing errors, and atmospheric turbulence severity. The results reveal that aperture averaging can improve the secrecy performance remarkably by suppressing the effects of turbulence. Monte Carlo simulations are provided to justify the accuracy of the proposed model.
This paper investigates the information-theoretic security of multi-particle diffusive molecular timing (DMT) channels for noise-limited and interference-limited scenarios. By utilizing a channel ...capacity upper bound expression, we obtain the secrecy outage probability (SOP), average secrecy outage rate (ASOR), and average secrecy outage duration (ASOD) expressions when the number of molecules arriving at Eve from Alice and Interferer follows Gaussian distribution. Subsequently, the effect of various channel parameters, such as Lévy noise parameter, molecular degradation, and molecular correlation on various secrecy metrics, is studied for both scenarios. In the noise-limited system, increasing molecular degradation leads to secrecy compromisation, with an increase in SOP and ASOD and a simultaneous decrease in ASOR. We also observe a significant improvement in the system's secrecy, especially in terms of ASOR, on increasing the Lévy noise parameter. Concurrently, we analyze the channel parameter's effect on the secrecy of the interference-limited scenario. From the ASOR and ASOD perspectives, we find that with increasing molecular degradation and correlation, the information-theoretic security of the system increases. However, increasing the Lévy noise parameter negatively impacts the system's secrecy. Finally, extending our analysis to a three-dimensional environment reveals that additional dimensions lead to secrecy deterioration for the noise-limited and interference-limited cases.
This Letter investigates the impacts of hardware impairments (HIs) and channel estimation errors (CEEs) on the secrecy performance of satellite communication networks with one legitimate user and one ...eavesdropper. Particularly, the authors derive the closed-form expression for the secrecy outage probability (SOP) of the considered secrecy satellite communication networks. Besides, in order to research the impact of the HIs and CEEs at high signal-to-noise ratios, they obtain the asymptotic expression for the SOP, which gives efficient and fast method to evaluate the effect of the considered system parameters on the secrecy system performance. At last, Monte Carlo computer results are given to verify the effects of HIs and CEEs on the secrecy system performance.
Backscatter communication (BC) systems are a promising technology for internet of things (IoT) applications that allow devices to transmit information by modulating ambient radio signals without the ...need for a dedicated power source. However, the security of BC systems is a critical concern due to the vulnerability of the wireless channel. This paper investigates the impact of side information (SI) on the secrecy performance of BC systems. SI mainly refers to the additional knowledge that is available to the communicating parties beyond transmitted data, which can be used to enhance reliability, efficiency, security, and quality of service in various communication systems. In particular, in this paper, by considering a non-causally known SI at the transmitter, we derive compact analytical expressions of average secrecy capacity (ASC) and secrecy outage probability (SOP) for the proposed system model to analyze how SI affects the secrecy performance of BC systems. Moreover, a Monte Carlo simulation validates the accuracy of our analytical results and reveals that considering such knowledge at the transmitter has constructive effects on the system performance and ensures reliable communication with higher rates than the conventional BC systems without SI, namely, lower SOP and higher ASC are achievable.
We investigate transmission optimization for intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) assisted multi-antenna systems from the physical-layer security perspective. The design goal is to maximize the ...system secrecy rate subject to the source transmit power constraint and the unit modulus constraints imposed on phase shifts at the IRS. To solve this complicated non-convex problem, we develop an efficient alternating algorithm where the solutions to the transmit covariance of the source and the phase shift matrix of the IRS are achieved in closed form and semi-closed form, respectively. The convergence of the proposed algorithm is guaranteed theoretically. Simulation results validate the performance advantage of the proposed optimized design.
In this study, the authors investigate the secrecy performance at the physical layer of wireless communication systems where the channels are modelled as cascaded fading channels, in which the fading ...effects are worse than those in the cellular communication channels like Rayleigh and Nakagami-m. Analytic results are derived for the cascaded Nakagami-m fading channel model comprising the cascaded Rayleigh, 2*Nakagami-m, the generalised-K, and the conventional cellular channel models as well. By evaluating the information-theoretic physical layer security performance, they obtain the closed-form expressions of the average secrecy capacity and probability of the positive secrecy capacity in case of that channel-state-information of the eavesdropper is known by the source. Then they obtain the exact closed-form secrecy outage probability (SOP) when the eavesdropper is passive. Analytic results are computed in terms of the bivariate and univariate Meijer's G functions and later on are successfully validated through Monte Carlo simulations. The simulation results show that the secrecy performance worsens with the increasing cascading degree of the fading channels. For example, in 2*Nakagami-m fading channels where the cascading degree is 2, extra 4 dB signal-to-noise ratio is required to achieve the same SOP value in comparison with the classical Nakagami-m fading channels.
In this work, we study the secrecy performance of a reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS)-aided wireless communication system in the presence of an eavesdropping user. Specifically, we assume ...that the RIS is placed between the source and the legitimate user and is used to improve the link security. In particular, analytical results for the secrecy outage probability (SOP) are derived. We also provide an asymptotic analysis to investigate the effect of the main parameters on the secrecy performance of our proposed system, such as the number of tunable elements of the RIS and the average signal-to-noise ratios. Finally, we verify our analytical results via simulations. Results show the positive effect of utilizing RISs for enhancing the secrecy performance in wireless systems.
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