A 6G wireless network will hide its own communications inside radar signals, noise, and jamming signals to stop eavesdroppers from even knowing a message exists. Future 6G networks are expected to combine radar sensing and wireless communication into a single system, sharing spectrum and hardware to save energy and bandwidth. But that shared spectrum creates a vulnerability: an attacker who can detect the communication signal can intercept it, jam it, or overload the network. Current security methods assume the attacker is either passive or half-duplex—able to listen or jam, but not both at once. This project addresses the more dangerous case of a full-duplex attacker who can simultaneously overhear and transmit malicious jamming signals. The researchers propose a three-part framework. First, they will hide the communication signal inside other signals so an adversary cannot detect it at all. Second, they will develop physical-layer security strategies to block passive eavesdroppers. Third, they will design robust strategies that maintain accurate radar sensing even while countering active, full-duplex attacks. If successful, this work could make future wireless infrastructure—including autonomous vehicle coordination, industrial IoT, and smart city systems—resilient against sophisticated cyberattacks that current 5G security cannot handle.
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Integrate sensing and communication (ISAC), which enables the radar sensing and wireless communication to be integrated to share the spectrum, hardware infrastructure and signal processing architectures, has been recognized as one promising technical supporter of providing spectrum- and energy-efficiency services for 6G network. However, due to the shared usage of the spectrum and broadcast nature of wireless medium, ISAC systems are facing multiple security threats and attacks that may result in information leakage, service outage and network congestion. To address above security issues, in this project, we propose a novel secure ISAC (S ISAC) framework for future wireless networks aimed at providing secure and reliable communication services with precise and accurate sensing simultaneously in the following three work packages. In the first work package (WP), a covert ISAC framework will be proposed to hide the communication signal into multiple other signals, including radar signal, noise signal and jamming signal and ensure the covert communication without being detected by the malicious adversary. Next, efficient physical layer security (PLS) strategies will be developed in the second WP to against the passive eavesdropping attacks, which are launched by half-duplex eavesdroppers with the capability of decoding the communication signals. Then, to against more harmful active eavesdropping attacks that are launched by full-duplex eavesdroppers who are capable of overhearing the communication signal and sending malicious jamming signal simultaneously, robust PLS strategies will be designed by satisfying the sensing requirements in the third WP. Finally, extensive simulation results will be provided to validate the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed S-ISAC design.
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