Research overview
The ANU’s Communications Research Group is known as Australia’s first and leading research group in wireless physical-layer security, which exploits the properties of wireless transmission and channels to achieve security in wireless networks, such as wireless Internet of Things (IoT) systems. We (A/Prof. Yang and A/Prof. Zhou) are working on novel ways to protect the confidentiality of data transmission, even with poor or no encryption. Also, the physical-layer properties of wireless transmission can be exploited for secret key generation and/or authentication between user terminals and base stations (e.g. the base station recognises that an IoT device currently requesting access is a legitimate and registered device and accordingly creates a secret key based on the channel knowledge between them, or a mobile terminal finds that a fake base station is requesting access to it). Cutting-edge signal processing and machine learning methods can be jointly used to boost wireless security (confidentiality or authentication), and software-defined radio transceivers can be used to build up a platform for test and demonstration.
Research details
Security in wireless Internet of Things (IoT) systems is now an emerging problem, since massive low-complexity wireless devices, e.g., sensors, are going to be used. In such systems, how can we safeguard the wireless communication among these vulnerable devices? Also, how can we implement cost-cautious authentication algorithms at these low-cost devices?
Wireless physical-layer security offers a new layer of security protection through smart manipulation in the transmission and reception of wireless signals, based on new coding and signal processing methods. It is a low-complexity and scalable solution which nicely complements current encryption-based security solutions. Also, it strongly enhances secrecy for low-complexity IoT devices and leads to new industrial standards and government policies on communication security.
