RINGS: Just-in-Time Security: Adaptive Physical-Layer Security for NextG Low-Latency mmWave Wireless Networks

The active deployment of wireless networks worldwide and the growth of machine-to-machine communications are exacerbating concerns for privacy and secrecy. Physical-layer security, which exploits the random imperfections inherent to wireless channels and devices to provide, e.g., secrecy or authentication, using physical-layer signal processing and coding algorithms, offers an approach to treat security on par with other system-level metrics, such as power consumption, throughput, and latency, at the design stage. There remains, however, a wide gap to bridge between the theory and practice of physical-layer security. This project addresses this challenge by combining hardware and software efforts, including milimeter-wave radio-frequency front-ends with beamforming capability and algorithms with low-latency, to create a physical-layer security monolithically integrated hardware platform. The outcome of this project will be hardware offering 'just-in-time secrecy,' in the sense of adapting to link conditions and achieve cost-effective tradeoffs between power, latency, and security.

The first thrust of this project investigates a hardware platform that integrates a broadband antenna array to engineer a physical-layer link suitable for physical-layer security together with a low-latency mixed-signal implementation of codes for secrecy. Efforts also include a security analysis to evaluate the system level tradeoffs incurred by secrecy. The second thrust of this project considers the development of novel front-end capabilities to further the resilience of the physical-layer security scheme, including a hybrid solution for ultra-low latency high precision beam forming and a reconfigurable power amplifier with antenna load variation resilience. The third thrust studies the integration of feedback in the system to sense the wireless environment and adapt the secrecy provided to instantaneous channel conditions.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.