A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances and Future Trends

This paper examines the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity, confidentiality, integrity and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state-of-the-art in physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer. We also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their counter-measures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive jammer, adaptive jammer and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.Comment: 36 pages. Accepted to Appear in Proceedings of the IEEE, 201

Wireless communication, sensing, and REM: A security perspective

The diverse requirements of next-generation communication systems necessitate awareness, flexibility, and intelligence as essential building blocks of future wireless networks. The awareness can be obtained from the radio signals in the environment using wireless sensing and radio environment mapping (REM) methods. This is, however, accompanied by threats such as eavesdropping, manipulation, and disruption posed by malicious attackers. To this end, this work analyzes the wireless sensing and radio environment awareness mechanisms, highlighting their vulnerabilities and provides solutions for mitigating them. As an example, the different threats to REM and its consequences in a vehicular communication scenario are described. Furthermore, the use of REM for securing communications is discussed and future directions regarding sensing/REM security are highlighted

Wireless Communication in the Presence of Illegal Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Signal Leakage and Interference Attack

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a promising technology in realizing a smart wireless communication system. RIS is a man-made surface consisting of massive passive reflecting elements, where each element can reflect the incident signal with tunable phase shifts. To protect wireless communication from security breaches, physical layer security (PLS), which exploits the characteristics of wireless channels, has been widely studied to ensure secure transmission. Due to the reconfigurability of RIS, it has great potential to enhance PLS in wireless systems by enhancing the channel condition of a legitimate user (LU) and impairing that of an eavesdropper (EAV). However, low hardware cost and reconfigurability lead to non-negligible risk as the EAV and attacker can also apply RIS to promote the data rate at EAV or strengthen the interference signal transmitted to jam a LU. In this article, we introduce a new concept, illegal reconfigurable intelligent surface (IRIS), which represents the illegal deployment and utilization of RIS. Two main security concerns in the presence of IRIS, namely, signal leakage and interference attack, are inves-tigated. The signal leakage means that IRIS can collect the information signal, which could not be received before. The interference attack means the information signal can deploy IRIS to enhance the interference signal power. We discuss several key challenges brought by IRIS, and an artificial noise (AN)-aided joint optimization-based solution to enhance PLS in the wireless communication system with both RIS and IRIS. Simulation results demonstrate the significant impact of IRIS on PLS and verify the effectiveness of the proposed AN-aided joint optimization-based solution