  This paper establishes the utility of user cooperation in facilitating secure
wireless communications. In particular, the four-terminal relay-eavesdropper
channel is introduced and an outer-bound on the optimal rate-equivocation
region is derived. Several cooperation strategies are then devised and the
corresponding achievable rate-equivocation region are characterized. Of
particular interest is the novel Noise-Forwarding (NF) strategy, where the
relay node sends codewords independent of the source message to confuse the
eavesdropper. This strategy is used to illustrate the deaf helper phenomenon,
where the relay is able to facilitate secure communications while being totally
ignorant of the transmitted messages. Furthermore, NF is shown to increase the
secrecy capacity in the reversely degraded scenario, where the relay node fails
to offer performance gains in the classical setting. The gain offered by the
proposed cooperation strategies is then proved theoretically and validated
numerically in the additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel.
