Integrating Communication, Sensing, and Security: Progress and Prospects of PLS in ISAC Systems

TL;DR

This paper reviews the integration of physical-layer security into integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems, highlighting techniques, challenges, and future prospects for secure, reliable, and efficient 6G networks.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive survey and tutorial on the intersection of PLS and ISAC, analyzing security trade-offs and technological impacts for future wireless networks.

Findings

Physical-layer techniques enhance sensing-security trade-offs.

Analysis of attacks on data confidentiality and sensing spoofing.

Guidelines for designing secure ISAC systems for 6G.

Abstract

The sixth generation of wireless networks defined several key performance indicators (KPIs) for assessing its networks, mainly in terms of reliability, coverage, and sensing. In this regard, remarkable attention has been paid recently to the integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) paradigm as an enabler for efficiently and jointly performing communication and sensing using the same spectrum and hardware resources. On the other hand, ensuring communication and data security has been an imperative requirement for wireless networks throughout their evolution. The physical-layer security (PLS) concept paved the way to catering to the security needs in wireless networks in a sustainable way while guaranteeing theoretically secure transmissions, independently of the computational capacity of adversaries. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to consider a balanced trade-off between communication reliability, sensing, and security in future networks, such as the 5G and beyond, and the 6G. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive and system-wise review of designed secure ISAC systems from a PLS point of view. In particular, the impact of various physical-layer techniques, schemes, and wireless technologies to ensure the sensing-security trade-off is studied from the surveyed work. Furthermore, the amalgamation of PLS and ISAC is analyzed in a broader impact by considering attacks targeting data confidentiality, communication covertness, and sensing spoofing. The paper also serves as a tutorial by presenting several theoretical foundations on ISAC and PLS, which represent a practical guide for readers to develop novel secure ISAC network designs.