No abstract

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) has recently emerged as a candidate 6G technology, aiming to unify the two key operations of the future network in a spectrum/energy/cost efficient way. ISAC systems communicate and sense for targets using a common waveform, a common hardware platform and ultimately the same network infrastructure. Nevertheless, the inclusion of information signalling into the probing waveform for target sensing raises challenges from the perspective of information security. At the same time, the sensing capability incorporated in the ISAC transmission offers unique opportunities to design secure ISAC techniques. This overview paper discusses these unique challenges and opportunities for next generation of ISAC networks. We first briefly discuss the fundamentals of waveform design for sensing and communication. Then, we detail the challenges and contradictory objectives involved in securing ISAC transmission, along with state-of-the-art approaches to ensure security. We then identify the new opportunity of using the sensing capability to obtain knowledge target information, as an enabling approach against the known weaknesses of PHY security. Finally, we illustrate some low-cost secure ISAC architectures, followed by a series of open research topics. This family of sensing-aided secure ISAC techniques brings a new insight on providing information security, with an eye on robust and hardware-constrained designs tailored for low-cost ISAC devices.

We study security solutions for dual-functional radar communication (DFRC) systems, which detect the radar target and communicate with downlink cellular users in millimeter-wave (mmWave) wireless networks simultaneously. Uniquely for such scenarios, the radar target is regarded as a potential eavesdropper which might surveil the information sent from the base station (BS) to communication users (CUs), that is carried by the radar probing signal. Transmit waveform and receive beamforming are jointly designed to maximize the signalto-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of the radar under the security and power budget constraints. We apply a Directional Modulation (DM) approach to exploit constructive interference (CI), where the known multiuser interference (MUI) can be exploited as a source of useful signal. Moreover, to further deteriorate the eavesdropping signal at the radar target, we utilize destructive interference (DI) by pushing the received symbols at the target towards the destructive region of the signal constellation. Our numerical results verify the effectiveness of the proposed design showing a secure transmission with enhanced performance against benchmark DFRC techniques.

Dual-functional radar communication (DFRC) system has recently attracted significant academic attentions as an enabling solution for realizing radar-communication spectrum sharing. During the DFRC transmission, however, the critical information could be leaked to the targets, which might be potential eavesdroppers. Therefore, the physical layer security has to be taken into consideration. In this paper, fractional programming (FP) problems are formulated to minimize the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) at targets under the constraints for the SINR of legitimate users. By doing so, the secrecy rate of communication can be guaranteed. We first assume that communication CSI and the angle of the target are precisely known. After that, problem is extended to the cases with uncertainty in the target's location, which indicates that the target might appear in a certain angular interval. Finally, numerical results have been provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method showing that it is viable to guarantee both radar and secrecy communication performances by using the techniques we propose.Index Terms-DFRC system, physical layer security, FP problem, secrecy rate.