Secure Integrated Sensing and Communication: Information Theory Offers Insights

TL;DR

This paper reviews information-theoretic methods for ensuring security in integrated sensing and communication systems, highlighting models, metrics, and fundamental limits across various threat scenarios.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive survey of secure ISAC approaches, organizing them by functionality and adversary models, and discusses tradeoffs among reliability, sensing, and security.

Findings

Organizes secure ISAC literature by functionality and adversary type.

Highlights tradeoffs between communication, sensing, and security.

Connects secure ISAC formulations to privacy and covert communication.

Abstract

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) combines sensing and communication within a shared system framework by using the same transmitted signal for both objectives. ISAC can improve the efficiency of spectrum and hardware use but also gives rise to new security challenges, as users associated with one function may need to be prevented from inferring information related to the other. This paper surveys information-theoretic approaches to secure ISAC with emphasis on formulations, performance metrics, and fundamental limits. We first review the information-theoretic ISAC models that underlie secure formulations. We then organize the secure ISAC literature according to the protected functionality and the adversary model, covering secure communication, sensing security, and active-adversary settings such as jamming. We also discuss formulations in which communication security and sensing security interact more directly, as well as their connections to privacy and covert communication. Throughout, we highlight the main modeling assumptions and the insights they provide on the tradeoffs among communication reliability, sensing performance, and security.