Physical Layer Security for 5G Communications: Challenges and Road Ahead

Dear Colleagues,

With the continued revolution in communication technologies, 5G networks are on the verge of revolutionizing digital wireless communication. The extensive usage of 5G networks is developing at a rapid pace due to the adoption of ultra-wide-bands whose delivery efficiency is to provide ultra-reliable low latency, high bandwidth, and extremely high throughput to the end-users. The 5G wireless communication technologies comprise millimeter wave (mmWave), massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), physical layer security coding (polar codes, lattice codes, low-density parity check codes), full-duplex technologies, etc. Advanced 5G wireless communication acts as a force multiplier for innovation technologies such as Industry 4.0, fog computing, IoT mobile cloud, and artificial intelligence (AI) increase the average data consumption for mobile users and is up to three times faster than 4G technology. However, the usage of wireless network is applicable in almost every field, such as energy trading, control information, bank transaction, and the transmission of sensitive medical information, resulting in high risks of security threats on the physical layer. Both active attacks and passive attacks are targeted by adversaries on the physical layer in wireless communication. The active attacks consist of jamming attacks on wireless powered networks in the form of spoofing attacks and denial of service (DoS) attacks which lead to malfunctioning of the target device and interrupt network operations. Passive attacks are eavesdropping attacks where an adversary behaves like a man-in-the-middle attack to monitor the underlying network in order to steal sensitive information such as verification codes, one-time passwords, identification numbers, etc. Covert detection is a passive attack in the physical layer in which an adversary performs traffic analysis on the network. In this regard, physical layer security (PLS) is a promising approach to provide high security and low complexity security solutions.  PLS aims to employ the intrinsic randomness of the transmission channel to ensure high security. PLS approach is of two types: (1) radio-frequency (RF)/hardware-based PLS; and (2) location/channel-based PLS. In RF-based PLS schemes, features are extracted from hardware or modulation to form an RF fingerprint to identify devices that needs a high-end signal analyzer (spectrum analyzer), whereas the channel-based PLS scheme identifies spoofing attacks (multiple devices uses the same identifier) or Sybil attacks (single device claims multiple identifiers) based on location features and the attacker is close to the victim to target the channel gains. Moreover, there are some open issues in the PLS scheme for 5G networks related to reducing hardware deployment overhead on RF based PLS and counter co-located channel-based attackers. 

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Physical layer security in IoT systems;
• Physical layer security for massive MIMO/mmWave/NOMA;
• Security and privacy of 5G wireless communication technologies, challenges, and open issues;
• Secrecy analysis and enhancement in PLS of 5G networks;
• Artificial intelligence (AI)-driven PLS for 5G industrial IoT applications;
• Machine learning tools and applications for enhancing physical layer security;
• Safeguarding PLS using software-defined radio access networks;
• IoT and cyber–physical system applications for 5G wireless powered networks (WPN).

Dr. Rajat Chaudhary
Dr. Ishan Budhiraja
Dr. Aaisha Makkar
Guest Editors

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• 5G networks
• physical layer security (PLS)
• wireless powered communication networks (WPCN)
• internet-of-things (IoT)