Integrating Communication, Sensing, and Security: Progress and Prospects of PLS in ISAC Systems

2025-05-08

AI Summary

Emerging 6G integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems face coupled challenges in communication reliability, sensing accuracy, and physical-layer security (PLS). Method: This work establishes, for the first time, a system-level unified modeling framework for PLS-empowered ISAC design, incorporating beamforming, artificial noise, channel randomness exploitation, joint radar-communication waveform design, covert coding, and sensing-parameter injection. It introduces a three-dimensional security evaluation framework—encompassing confidentiality, covertness, and anti-sensing-spoofing—and systematically analyzes sensing-security trade-offs and defense paradigms against eavesdropping, covertness disruption, and sensing spoofing. Contribution/Results: We synthesize over 30 representative schemes to reveal fundamental performance limits and construct a theory-to-practice mapping guide. The work delivers verifiable design principles and standardization-ready foundations for endogenous security in 5G-Advanced and 6G ISAC systems.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Multiagent Systems: Agent Communication
• Machine Learning: Calibration & Uncertainty Quantification

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Novel mobile and WoT systems, and system-of-systems
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Attacks and countermeasures in recommendation systems

Abstract

The sixth generation of wireless networks defined several key performance indicators (KPIs) for assessing its networks, mainly in terms of reliability, coverage, and sensing. In this regard, remarkable attention has been paid recently to the integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) paradigm as an enabler for efficiently and jointly performing communication and sensing using the same spectrum and hardware resources. On the other hand, ensuring communication and data security has been an imperative requirement for wireless networks throughout their evolution. The physical-layer security (PLS) concept paved the way to catering to the security needs in wireless networks in a sustainable way while guaranteeing theoretically secure transmissions, independently of the computational capacity of adversaries. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to consider a balanced trade-off between communication reliability, sensing, and security in future networks, such as the 5G and beyond, and the 6G. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive and system-wise review of designed secure ISAC systems from a PLS point of view. In particular, the impact of various physical-layer techniques, schemes, and wireless technologies to ensure the sensing-security trade-off is studied from the surveyed work. Furthermore, the amalgamation of PLS and ISAC is analyzed in a broader impact by considering attacks targeting data confidentiality, communication covertness, and sensing spoofing. The paper also serves as a tutorial by presenting several theoretical foundations on ISAC and PLS, which represent a practical guide for readers to develop novel secure ISAC network designs.

Problem

• Balancing communication reliability, sensing, and security in 6G networks
• Integrating PLS with ISAC for secure and efficient wireless systems
• Addressing sensing-security trade-offs using physical-layer techniques

Innovation

• Integrates communication and sensing using ISAC
• Ensures security with physical-layer techniques
• Balances reliability, sensing, and security trade-offs