Unlike traditional security approaches that operate at higher layers (such as encryption in the network or application layers), these techniques often feature lightweight implementations, making them well-suited for resource-constrained scenarios. Common attacks and vulnerabilities addressed in physical layer security include:
- Eavesdropping: By taking advantage of the broadcast nature of wireless communications, an unauthorized party intercepts the transmitted signal in an attempt to decode confidential information.
- Jamming: An adversary deliberately introducing noise or interference into the communication channel to degrade or disrupt the communication. Some recent works:
GNSS and Massive MIMO: Spoofing, Jamming and Robust Receiver Design for Impulsive Noise - Spoofing: The attacker pretends to be a legitimate sender or receiver by falsifying signal characteristics, which can lead to unauthorized access or manipulation of the communication.
- Relay Attacks (Man-in-the-Middle): An adversary intercepts a signal between two communicating devices and relays it, often amplifying or manipulating it, without detection.
- Pilot spoofing attack: Adversaries inject malicious signals during the channel estimation phase, corrupting the estimation and leading to degraded communication quality or security vulnerabilities.
- Channel Manipulation Attacks: Attackers attempt to manipulate the wireless channel by introducing obstacles, reflectors, or other environmental changes to alter the characteristics of the signal propagation.
- Privacy attacks: At the physical layer, these attacks focus on the physical properties of wireless signals or device behaviour to infer sensitive information or locate and track users. Some recent papers:
Over-the-Air Federated Learning with Privacy Protection via Correlated Additive Perturbations
Privacy-Preserving Framework for Cell-Free MIMO ISAC Systems - Attacks in over-the-air computation: Active attackers send random or misleading data to alter the aggregated data received by the server in Over-the-Air (OtA) computation. OtA computation is a newly emerged concept for computing functions of data from distributed nodes by taking advantage of the wave superposition property of wireless channels. Some recent papers:
Detecting Active Attacks in Over-the-Air Computation using Dummy Samples
We are interested at discovering new vulnerabilities and new opportunities for physical layer security in wireless communication systems by exploiting emerging technologies, such as co-located and distributed massive MIMO, integrated sensing and communication, over-the-air federated learning, and sub-THz transmissions.
Projects:
We contribute to the Cost Action 6G-PHYSEC in topics related to Trustworthiness for 6G and physical layer security. We lead working group 1.
