Short-packet communication is a key technology to support two emerging application scenarios in 5G and beyond 5G, massive machine type communication (mMTC) and ultra-reliable low latency communication (uRLLC), which are introduced to satisfy the broader communication requirements of potential applications such as the internet of vehicles and industrial internet of things (IoT). The sharp increase in privacy data in various IoT applications has made security issues more prominent. The typical upper-layer encryption mechanism could not fully address the security challenge considering the resource restriction of IoT terminals. In this article, we investigate secure short-packet communication from the perspective of physical layer security (PLS), which can be regarded as a promising security solution in 6G. Specifically, the state-of-the-art development of fundamental information theory of secure short-packet communications and corresponding performance evaluation criterion in fading channels are summarized. Then we review recent works, which investigate short-packet communication systems (CSs) in different communication scenarios or with different security strategies from the perspective of PLS.Finally, we give future research directions and challenges.performance of secure strategies such as on-off transmission, space-time coding and cooperative communication based on the performance parameters and analysis framework mentioned in this article, then select promising secure solutions from them for potential 6G applications. What's more, combining emerging 6G technologies such as intelligent reflecting surface to improve system secrecy performance should also be given full attention. In addition, how to design secrecy coding schemes for short-packet CSs to reach the achievable secrecy rate as close as possible is still an open issue.
VI. CONCLUSIONSIn this article, we provide an overview of the latest research results of secure short-packet wireless communication from the perspective of PLS. On the basis of reviewing the state-of-theart progress of secure short-packet information theory, this work provides ergodic/outage-based secrecy performance metrics which are suitable for performance analysis of short-packet systems.Furthermore, recent works investigate diverse CSs with short packets from the perspective of PLS are reviewed. Some valuable research directions on the topic of secure short-packet communication have been provided. We hope this overview can provide help and inspiration for subsequent research and promote more important and practical research in 6G.