Abstract

Wireless communications’ infrastructures are frequently selected as a cable replacement in many applications giving an immediate advantage on the wireless investment. However, the worldwide proliferation of wireless local area network (WLAN) imposed large investments on the network security. In the early days of Internet, its layered protocol stack did not consider security as a primary concern. Because then, a significant amount of literature has been published. This paper proposes a watermark‐based blind physical layer security utilizing a jamming receiver in conjunction with the spread spectrum watermarking technique. The outage probability of the secrecy capacity is analytically derived, regardless of the eavesdropper position. The theoretical analysis let us draw a secure region around the legitimate receiver. Results indicate how the watermark‐based blind physical layer security aims to be a valuable technique for deploying physical layer security. Authors utilized 2 performance metrics, the outage probability of secrecy capacity for assessing the secure communication effectiveness and the error probability for evaluating the watermark extraction process. Finally, the proposed protocol improves the secrecy capacity performance if compared with other protocols, and moreover, it has a lower energy consumption.