Cyber-Secure Biological Systems (CSBS)

The boom of connected IoT nodes and ubiquity of wireless communications are projected to increase wireless data traffic by several orders of magnitude in the near future. While these future scalable networks support increasing numbers of wireless devices utilizing the EM spectrum, ensuring the security of wireless communications and sensing is also a critical requirement under tight resource constraints. The physical layer has increasingly become the target of attacks by exploiting hardware weaknesses, e.g., side-channel attacks, and signal properties, e.g., time, frequency, and modulation characteristics. This talk introduces common security vulnerabilities within wireless systems such as jamming, eavesdropping, counterfeiting, and spoofing, followed by physical-layer countermeasures, while assessing the trade-offs between performance and security. It examines recent research directions, e.g., secure spatio-temporal modulated arrays, temporal swapping of decomposed constellations, RF fingerprinting, and bit-level frequency hopping, and finally discusses research opportunities looking forward.