Physical Layer Security -- from Theory to Practice

TL;DR

This paper reviews the current state of physical layer security (PLS), discussing its theoretical foundations, practical challenges, and future research directions for integrating PLS into 6G wireless security standards.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive critical review of PLS technologies, identifies key hurdles for practical deployment in 6G, and proposes research directions including a vision for context-aware 6G security.

Findings

Fundamental limits of PLS are well-characterized.

Practical deployment requires channel engineering and pre-processing.

Research directions include context-aware security solutions.

Abstract

A large spectrum of technologies are collectively dubbed as physical layer security (PLS), ranging from wiretap coding, secret key generation (SKG), authentication using physical unclonable functions (PUFs), localization / RF fingerprinting, anomaly detection monitoring the physical layer (PHY) and hardware. Despite the fact that the fundamental limits of PLS have long been characterized, incorporating PLS in future wireless security standards requires further steps in terms of channel engineering and pre-processing. Reflecting upon the growing discussion in our community, in this critical review paper, we ask some important questions with respect to the key hurdles in the practical deployment of PLS in 6G, but also present some research directions and possible solutions, in particular our vision for context-aware 6G security that incorporates PLS.