Cellular communication technologies such as 5G are deployed on a large scale around the world. Compared to other communication technologies such as WiFi, Bluetooth, or Ultra Wideband (UWB), the 5G communication standard describes support for a large variety of use cases, e.g., Internet of Things (loT), vehicular, industrial, and campus-wide communications. An organization can operate a Private 5G network to provide connectivity to devices in their manufacturing environment. Physical Layer Key Generation (PLKG) is a method to generate a symmetric secret on two nodes despite the presence of a potential passive eavesdropper. To the best of our knowledge, this work is one of the first to implement PLKG in a real Private 5G network. Therefore, it highlights the possibility of integrating PLKG in the communication technology highly relevant for industrial applications. This paper exemplifies the establishment of a long-term symmetric key between an aerial vehicle and IT infrastructure both located in a manufacturing environment and communicating via the radio interface of the Private 5G network.
Cellular communication technologies such as 5G are deployed on a large scale around the world. Compared to other communication technologies such as WiFi, Bluetooth, or Ultra Wideband (UWB), the 5G communication standard describes support for a large variety of use cases, e.g., Internet of Things (loT), vehicular, industrial, and campus-wide communications. An organization can operate a Private 5G network to provide connectivity to devices in their manufacturing environment. Physical Layer Key Generation (PLKG) is a method to generate a symmetric secret on two nodes despite the presence of a potential passive eavesdropper. To the best of our knowledge, this work is one of the first to implement PLKG in a real Private 5G network. Therefore, it highlights the possibility of integrating PLKG in the communication technology highly relevant for industrial applications. This paper exemplifies the establishment of a long-term symmetric key between an aerial vehicle and IT infrastructure both located in a manufacturing environment and communicating via the radio interface of the Private 5G network.
Due to its high mobility and flexible deployment, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is drawing unprecedented interest in both military and civil applications to enable agile wireless communications and provide ubiquitous connectivity. Mainly operating in an open environment, UAV communications can benefit from dominant line-of-sight links; however, it on the other hand renders the UAVs more vulnerable to malicious eavesdropping or jamming attacks. Recently, physical layer security (PLS), which exploits the inherent randomness of the wireless channels for secure communications, has been introduced to UAV systems as an important complement to the conventional cryptography-based approaches. In this paper, a comprehensive survey on the current achievements of the UAV-aided wireless communications is conducted from the PLS perspective. We first introduce the basic concepts of UAV communications including the typical static/mobile deployment scenarios, the unique characteristics of air-to-ground channels, as well as various roles that a UAV may act when PLS is concerned. Then, we introduce the widely used secrecy performance metrics and start by reviewing the secrecy performance analysis and enhancing techniques for statically deployed UAV systems, and extend the discussion to a more general scenario where the UAVs' mobility is further exploited. For both cases, respectively, we summarize the commonly adopted methodologies in the corresponding analysis and design, then describe important works in the literature in detail. Finally, potential research directions and challenges are discussed to provide an outlook for future works in the area of UAV-PLS in 5G and beyond networks.
The increasing demands for Internet of things (IoT) applications and the tremendous increase in the volume of IoT generated data bring novel challenges for the fifth generation (5G) network. Verticals such as e-Health, vehicle to everything (V2X) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) require solutions that can guarantee low latency, energy efficiency,massive connectivity, and high reliability. In particular, finding strong security mechanisms that satisfy the above is of central importance for bringing the IoT to life. \nIn this regards, employing physical layer security (PLS) methods could be greatly beneficial for IoT networks. While current security solutions rely on computational complexity, PLS is based on information theoretic proofs. By removing the need for computational power, PLS is ideally suited for resource constrained devices. In detail, PLS can ensure security using the inherit randomness already present in the physical channel. Promising schemes from the physical layer include physical unclonable functions (PUFs), which are seen as the hardware fingerprint of a device, and secret key generation (SKG) from wireless fading coefficients, which provide the wireless fingerprint of the communication channel between devices. \nThe present thesis develops several PLS-based techniques that pave the way for a new breed of latency-aware, lightweight, security protocols. In particular, the work proposes: i) a fast multi-factor authentication solution with verified security properties based on PUFs, proximity detection and SKG; ii) an authenticated encryption SKG approach that interweaves data transmission and key generation; and, iii) a set of countermeasures to man-in-the-middle and jamming attacks. Overall, PLS solutions show promising performance, especially in the context of IoT applications, therefore, the advances in this thesis should be considered for beyond-5G networks.
The fifth generation (5G) network would be a key facilitator to keeping up to the future wireless application demands such as ultra-high data rate, ultra-wide radio coverage, ultra — low latency, large number of devices connected etc. Security is a crucial issue in the 5G network as wireless transmissions have the innate quality of vulnerability towards unfriendly breach or hacks. In this paper, security issue in the 5G network, specifically the physical layer security, has been analyzed. The physical layer safeguards confidentiality of data by capitalizing on the inherent random nature of the communication medium. There are various technologies prevalent in 5G, the three most prominent ones-heterogeneous networks, massive multiple-input multiple-output, and millimeter wave have been considered and discussed. The potential areas for improvement and issues in each of the technologies have been identified and analyzed. This analysis would help in better understanding of physical layer security in the future.
The fifth generation (5G) and beyond wireless communications will transform many exciting applications and trigger massive data connections with private, confidential, and sensitive information. The security of wireless communications is conventionally established by cryptographic schemes and protocols in which the secret key distribution is one of the essential primitives. However, traditional cryptography-based key distribution protocols might be challenged in the 5G and beyond communications because of special features such as device-to-device and heterogeneous communications, and ultra-low latency requirements. Channel reciprocity-based key generation (CRKG) is an emerging physical layer-based technique to establish secret keys between devices. This article reviews CRKG when the 5G and beyond networks employ three candidate technologies: duplex modes, massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and mmWave communications. We identify the opportunities and challenges for CRKG and provide corresponding solutions. To further demonstrate the feasibility of CRKG in practical communication systems, we overview existing prototypes with different IoT protocols and examine their performance in real-world environments. This article shows the feasibility and promising performances of CRKG with the potential to be commercialized.
The fifth-generation mobile communication technology (5G) supports wireless data transmission across civil, commercial, industrial, and even military networks, where vast amounts of privacy data are constantly transmitted. However, the open nature of the air interface in 5G systems makes them vulnerable to various attacks. Physical-layer key generation (PKG) has been recognized as a highly promising technology for ensuring data security in 5G systems, while existing PKG schemes achieve low key entropy (i.e., low key randomness) due to poor channel probing and quantization. In this paper, we propose a PKG scheme with high key entropy, tailored to the unique characteristics of 5G systems. First, we design a channel probing method based on the demodulation reference signal in accordance with 5G standards, enhancing the similarity between channel measurements. Next, we introduce a quantization method based on local increment and monotonicity, which effectively leverages channel characteristics to achieve high-speed key generation and improve key entropy. Finally, we use both MATLAB simulation and real-world channel measurements to achieve comprehensive verification of the proposed scheme. The simulation results showed that the proposed scheme increases the key entropy by at least 25% with nearly the same key generation rate compared with existing PKG schemes for 5G systems. The experiment using real-world channel measurements also confirmed that the proposed scheme has higher key entropy.
This paper addresses the confidentiality of wireless communications in industrial internet-of-things environments by investigating the feasibility of secret key generation for link-layer encryption using ultra wideband (UWB) signals. Taking advantage of the nanosecond-level temporal resolution offered by ultra wideband, we exploit channel reciprocity to extract highly detailed, noise-like channel measurements, in line with the physical-layer security paradigm. Three key generation algorithms, operating in both the time and frequency domains, are evaluated using real-world data collected through a dedicated measurement campaign in an industrial setting. The analysis, conducted under realistic conditions, examines the impact of practical impairments, such as imperfect channel reciprocity and timing misalignments, on the key agreement rate and the length of the generated keys. The results confirm the strong potential of ultra wideband technology to enable robust physical-layer security, offering a viable and efficient solution for securing wireless communications in complex and dynamic industrial internet-of-things environments.