Heterogeneous Internet of Things (IoT) and multi-access mobile edge computing (MA-MEC) are believed as supporting technologies for building a smart city. The advancement and flourish of IoT are facilitating the entry of human society into the Internet of Everything era, which lay the foundation of the smart city. To address the conflict between computation capability and low-cost mobile devices in IoT, the MA-MEC is available for supporting the resource-limited and computation-sensitive services and applications by computation offloading and distributed content delivery/caching. However, deploying cloud computing capability within the radio access network may face serious security threats, which stem from not only the existing technologies and networks but also the MA-MEC-based IoT itself. Therefore, in this paper, the solutions to address the security threats are investigated from physical layer perspectives, since physical layer security technologies have the advantages of achieving perfect secrecy, low-computational complexity, and resource consumption, and good adaptation for channel changes. Specifically, we investigate the secure wiretap coding, resource allocation, signal processing, and multi-node cooperation, along with physical layer key generation and authentication, to cope with the emerging security challenges. Finally, the paper is concluded with some possible future research directions.
Heterogeneous Internet of Things (IoT) and multi-access mobile edge computing (MA-MEC) are believed as supporting technologies for building a smart city. The advancement and flourish of IoT are facilitating the entry of human society into the Internet of Everything era, which lay the foundation of the smart city. To address the conflict between computation capability and low-cost mobile devices in IoT, the MA-MEC is available for supporting the resource-limited and computation-sensitive services and applications by computation offloading and distributed content delivery/caching. However, deploying cloud computing capability within the radio access network may face serious security threats, which stem from not only the existing technologies and networks but also the MA-MEC-based IoT itself. Therefore, in this paper, the solutions to address the security threats are investigated from physical layer perspectives, since physical layer security technologies have the advantages of achieving perfect secrecy, low-computational complexity, and resource consumption, and good adaptation for channel changes. Specifically, we investigate the secure wiretap coding, resource allocation, signal processing, and multi-node cooperation, along with physical layer key generation and authentication, to cope with the emerging security challenges. Finally, the paper is concluded with some possible future research directions.
The pervasiveness of commercial Internet of Things (IoT) around the globe is expected to reach significant levels with the upcoming sixth generation of mobile networks (6G). Throughout the past years, wireless standardization units worldwide have been prominently active in the deployment and performance optimization of such IoT networks and fusing them with current and futuristic cellular networks. Nonetheless, the openness of wireless transmissions and the forecasted overwhelm in connected devices will provoke unprecedented security leakages and vulnerabilities. In addition to the key targets of the 6G and IoT, it has been of paramount importance to cater to decent and lightweight security mechanisms in ultra-massively connected heterogeneous networks. Recently, significant efforts have been made to pave the way for the integration of physical layer security (PLS) in contemporary and futuristic networks. The primary motivation behind its deployment resides in its low complexity and ability to provide information-theoretic secure transmissions, which alleviates the complexity burden caused by implementing complex cryptographic schemes. This survey overviews the recent advancement in PLS techniques with a particular interest in its application to the Internet of Things (IoT). We review essentially recent PLS techniques aiming at ensuring message confidentiality along with node/message authentication and malicious nodes’ detection, where their corresponding application scenarios and underlying pros and cons are discussed. On top of that, we explore recent findings in the incorporation of cutting-edge technologies at the physical layer, such as non-orthogonal multiple-access, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, joint communication and sensing, and optical wireless/Terahertz communications in boosting confidentiality and authentication at the physical layer. Lastly, promising extensions and future directions are discussed based on the quantified pros and cons of each PLS category, opening up ways for timely research directions within the topic and current/future challenges faced by PLS.
Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly spreading and reaching a multitude of different domains, since the fifth generation (5G) wireless technologies are the key enablers of many IoT applications. It is hence apparent that the broadcast nature of IoT devices makes data security unprecedentedly critical. Compared with traditional cryptography algorithms, which cannot cater for the features of IoT devices characterized by the severe limits in terms of energy, computation and storage capabilities, physical layer security (PLS) has been regarded as a promising solution to facilitate secure communications by exploiting the intrinsic randomness of the wireless medium. However, most of previous works assumed that all devices are static, and the impact of mobility on PLS deserves further investigation. In this paper, applying two types of random mobile models, i.e., the models of Random WayPoint (RWP) and Random Direction (RD), we study the impact of mobility on PLS in a scenario with three types of wireless devices (i.e., a destination, multiple interferers and an eavesdropper). Specifically, we establish an analytical framework for secrecy transmission capacity (STC), a fundamental metric in the study of PLS, under RWP and RD models. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to derive STC and present the condition to achieve a positive STC with the consideration of mobility. We conclude that the RWP mobile destination can achieve a higher STC than that achievable in RD mobile and static scenarios, while RWP mobile eavesdropper is a challenging scenario to obtain a positive STC. Therefore, we propose an effective secrecy improvement strategy for the latter. Simulation validates the theoretical analyses.
The evolution of smart cities will contribute to an increase in the use of interconnected physical/digital ecosystems, and consequently, an increase in threat surface for the cyber threats against the protected data streams. With the emergence of quantum-based cyberthreats, this has increased the potential range of types of cyber-attacks on protected data and increased the use of quantum-based means of conducting cyber-attacks on protected data. This research proposal presents an Internet of Things (IoT) smart city framework founded on quantum-secure standards that were developed for next-generation IoT smart cities. The IoT Smart City Framework is comprised of four levels of architecture: a Quantum Backbone, a Key Management Level, an Edge Gateway Level, and an IoT Device Layer. Consequently, through the use of this architecture, the IoT Smart City Framework can protect the IoT Smart City Network from future cybercriminal attacks while providing assurance that the IoT Smart City Framework has been 'future-proofed.' By utilizing strategically deployed quantum nodes, the proposed solution performs QKD and frees devices with limited resources from needing to perform highly computationally intensive cryptography in order to secure encrypted communications, instead employing Lightweight Encryption Standards in conjunction with Symmetric Keys established via QKD. Using simulated quantum channels and urban IoT workloads, our experimental results yield secret key rates between 12 and 18 kilobits/sec (kbps) with a low quantum bit error rate (QBER) of 1.8% to 3.2%. Based on these experimental results, we conclude that the proposed hierarchical security architecture provides a resilient security framework for urban essential services, with negligible energy consumption.
With the uninterrupted revolution of communications technologies and the great-leap-forward development of emerging applications, the ubiquitous deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) is imperative to accommodate constantly growing user demands and market scales. Communication security is critically important for the operations of IoT. Among the communication security provisioning techniques, physical layer security (PLS), which can provide unbreakable, provable, and quantifiable secrecy from an information-theoretical point of view, has drawn considerable attention from both the academia and the industries. However, the unique features of IoT, such as low-cost, wide-range coverage, massive connection, and diversified services, impose great challenges for the PLS protocol design in IoT. In this article, we present a comprehensive review of the PLS techniques toward IoT applications. The basic principle of PLS is first briefly introduced, followed by the survey of the existing PLS techniques. Afterwards, the characteristics of IoT are identified, based on which the challenges faced by PLS protocol design are summarized. Then, three newly-proposed PLS solutions are highlighted, which match the features of IoT well and are expected to be applied in the near future. Finally, we conclude the paper and point out some further research directions.
The rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) has driven the need for advanced computational frameworks capable of handling the complex data processing and security challenges that modern IoT applications demand. However, traditional cloud computing frameworks face significant latency, scalability, and security issues. Quantum-Edge Cloud Computing (QECC) offers an innovative solution by integrating the computational power of quantum computing with the low-latency advantages of edge computing and the scalability of cloud computing resources. This study is grounded in an extensive literature review, performance improvements, and metrics data from Bangladesh, focusing on smart city infrastructure, healthcare monitoring, and the industrial IoT sector. The discussion covers vital elements, including integrating quantum cryptography to enhance data security, the critical role of edge computing in reducing response times, and cloud computing's ability to support large-scale IoT networks with its extensive resources. Through case studies such as the application of quantum sensors in autonomous vehicles, the practical impact of QECC is demonstrated. Additionally, the paper outlines future research opportunities, including developing quantum-resistant encryption techniques and optimizing quantum algorithms for edge computing. The convergence of these technologies in QECC has the potential to overcome the current limitations of IoT frameworks, setting a new standard for future IoT applications.
Physical layer security (PLS) has become the kernel concept for ensuring wireless network security. The main goal of this treatise is to provide a systematic classification of key less schemes. We have classified key less PLS into code, channel adaptation and artificial noise (AN) based approaches and carried out a survey of the diverse schemes employed in literature for key less approach. Further, we have provided the advantages, observations and future directions for each of the techniques. Industry 4.0 revolution with the Internet of Things (IoT) is going to rule the next wireless era with its promising smart home, smart health care, smart retail to name a few. Therefore, we have provided a discussion on the application of key less PLS in IoT. Further, we also discuss about two emerging areas that can be employed for enhancing PLS such as Intelligent Reflecting Surface (IRS) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). We have also provided some of the existing security challenges in the IoT application scenario. We have also presented the open research challenges and future directions in the area of key less PLS.