This paper introduces a multi-beam secure communication scheme for hybrid near-field and far-field (hNF) scenarios, primarily designed to address the challenges faced by sixth-generation (6G) networks in simultaneously managing near-field and far-field communications. This method significantly reduces the signal quality at eavesdroppers(Eves) while ensuring high-quality reception for legitimate users, effectively enhancing communication security. At the transmitter, this study employs multi-beam symbol-level directional modulation to ensure secure and reliable transmission in a mixed eavesdropping environment. Given the uncertainty about eavesdropper information, the transmission beamforming vectors are specially designed to meet specific symbol-level constraints, thereby ensuring effective reception for legitimate users. Experimental and simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in improving secrecy performance, reducing transmission power, and enhancing energy efficiency, offering a practical solution to the security challenges faced by future wireless networks.
This paper introduces a multi-beam secure communication scheme for hybrid near-field and far-field (hNF) scenarios, primarily designed to address the challenges faced by sixth-generation (6G) networks in simultaneously managing near-field and far-field communications. This method significantly reduces the signal quality at eavesdroppers(Eves) while ensuring high-quality reception for legitimate users, effectively enhancing communication security. At the transmitter, this study employs multi-beam symbol-level directional modulation to ensure secure and reliable transmission in a mixed eavesdropping environment. Given the uncertainty about eavesdropper information, the transmission beamforming vectors are specially designed to meet specific symbol-level constraints, thereby ensuring effective reception for legitimate users. Experimental and simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in improving secrecy performance, reducing transmission power, and enhancing energy efficiency, offering a practical solution to the security challenges faced by future wireless networks.
In this paper, we consider a physical layer security (PLS) problem for a hybrid wiretapping wireless system in millimeter-wave transmission, where the active eavesdropper and passive eavesdropper (Eve) may coexist to intercept the confidential messages and emit jamming signals. To achieve secure and reliable transmission, we propose a switched phased-array directional modulation (DM) scheme that employs multi-beam symbol-level precoding with aided artificial noise (AN) technique at the transmitter, and array reception at legitimate users (LU). Here we consider a more practical case that the information of the eavesdropper (Eve) is unknown by the transmitter. Leveraging DM beamforming, we aim to minimize transmit message power by optimizing the beamforming vector, subject to prescribed symbol-level constraints, thus generating exact/relaxed phases at LU. The remaining transmit power can be utilized to generate AN. Additionally, by means of the minimum variance distortionless response method at the LU, the jamming caused by active Eve can be efficiently eliminated. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed scheme.
Prior studies on wideband physical layer security (PLS) have mostly focused on either far-field or near-field communication systems. In this paper, we investigate PLS in a more general and practical mixed near-field and far-field wideband communication scenario, where a base station (BS) equipped with an extremely large-scale array (XL-array) serves multiple legitimate users in the far field, while a near-field eavesdropper attempts to intercept confidential information at close range. Specifically, we formulate an optimization problem to maximize the secrecy rate of all legitimate users across all subcarriers by jointly designing the transmit beamforming and artificial noise (AN), subject to per-subcarrier power constraints. To gain useful insights into the unique characteristics of mixed-field wideband PLS, we first analyze a special case with a single legitimate user and an eavesdropper. Interestingly, we show that the secure transmission regions in mixed-field wideband systems are not the same across all subcarriers, as revealed by subcarrier-specific secrecy conditions derived from the Fresnel integrals. Moreover, we theoretically demonstrate that introducing frequency-selective AN into the system offers two key benefits: 1) it transforms originally insecure subcarriers into secure ones, and 2) it substantially improves the overall secrecy performance. For the general multiuser setup, we propose an efficient two-stage hybrid beamforming algorithm to jointly design the transmit beamforming and AN, ensuring secure transmission under mixed-field conditions. Building on our analytical insights, we further develop an efficient and low-complexity algorithm that designs the AN beamformers by directly aligning them with the eavesdropper's channel, thereby eliminating the need to optimize AN beamformers across all subcarriers.
As a promising paradigm for the sixth-generation (6G) networks, task-oriented semantic communication significantly enhances transmission efficiency. However, it faces complex security challenges, particularly the risk of eavesdropping due to the open nature of wireless channels. To address this issue, we propose a secure semantic communication framework that integrates physical-layer secure beamforming (SBF) to safeguard semantic information from eavesdropping. Specifically, we design an SBF network to generate SBF vectors that focus signal beams on legitimate users to enhance signal power while directing designed artificial noise toward potential eavesdroppers to strengthen jamming. To further improve system adaptability across varying channel conditions, we introduce attention-based channel-aware modules that dynamically optimize the encoding, decoding, and beamforming processes based on perceived channel state information. Furthermore, task-oriented artificial noise is employed to degrade the task performance of eavesdroppers more effectively. Finally, a stepwise training strategy with task-specific loss functions is employed to jointly optimize the SBF and semantic modules, maximizing the performance gap in downstream tasks between legitimate users and eavesdroppers. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach effectively maintains task performance for legitimate users while significantly suppressing eavesdroppers, outperforming conventional methods.
In this work, a directional modulation-based technique is devised to enhance the security of a multi-antenna wireless communication system employing M-PSK modulation to convey information. The directional modulation method operates by steering the array beam in such a way that the phase of the received signal at the receiver matches that of the intended M-PSK symbol. Due to the difference between the channels of the legitimate receiver and the eavesdropper, the signals received by the eavesdropper generally encompass a phase component different than the actual symbols. As a result, the transceiver which employs directional modulation can impose a high symbol error rate on the eavesdropper without requiring to know the eavesdropper's channel. The optimal directional modulation beamformer is designed to minimize the consumed power subject to satisfying a specific resulting phase and minimal signal amplitude at each antenna of the legitimate receiver. The simulation results show that the directional modulation results in a much higher symbol error rate at the eavesdropper compared to the conventional benchmark scheme, i.e., zero-forcing precoding at the transmitter.
In this work, a directional modulation-based technique is devised to enhance the security of a multi-antenna wireless communication system employing M-PSK modulation to convey information. The directional modulation method operates by steering the array beam in such a way that the phase of the received signal at the receiver matches that of the intended M-PSK symbol. Due to the difference between the channels of the legitimate receiver and the eavesdropper, the signals received by the eavesdropper generally encompass a phase component different than the actual symbols. As a result, the transceiver which employs directional modulation can impose a high symbol error rate on the eavesdropper without requiring to know the eavesdropper's channel. The optimal directional modulation beamformer is designed to minimize the consumed power subject to satisfying a specific resulting phase and minimal signal amplitude at each antenna of the legitimate receiver. The simulation results show that the directional modulation results in a much higher symbol error rate at the eavesdropper compared to the conventional benchmark scheme, i.e., zero-forcing precoding at the transmitter.
Extremely large-scale arrays (XL-arrays) have emerged as a promising technology to improve the spectrum efficiency and spatial resolution of future wireless systems. Different from existing works that mostly considered physical layer security (PLS) in either the far-field or near-field, we consider in this paper a new and challenging scenario, where legitimate users (Bobs) are located in the far-field while eavesdroppers (Eves) are located in the near-field for intercepting confidential information at short distance, referred to as the mixed near- and far-field PLS. Specifically, we formulate an optimization problem to maximize the sum-secrecy-rate of all Bobs by designing their power allocation. To shed useful insights, we first consider a one-Bob-one-Eve system and characterize the insecure-transmission region of the Bob. Interestingly, we show that the insecuretransmission region is significantly expanded as compared to that in conventional far-field PLS systems, due to the energy-spread effect in the mixed-field scenario. Then, we propose an efficient algorithm to obtain a high-quality solution to the non-convex optimization problem. Finally, numerical results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm achieves a higher sum-secrecyrate than the benchmark scheme where the power allocation is designed based on the (simplified) far-field channel model.