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Secure Integrated Sensing and Communication against Communication and Sensing Eavesdropping

Sidong Guo, Matthieu R. Bloch

TL;DR

This work develops an information-theoretic framework for secure ISAC under a fixed environmental state, combining sequential decision-making, feedback-enabled key generation, and state-aware coding. It reveals a fundamental trade-off between secrecy rate and sensing/security exponents, and proves an achievable region that incorporates three operating modes: sensing-security optimization, resolvability-based secrecy with preserved sensing, and open-loop secrecy with minimal state leakage. The approach leverages a block-based adaptive policy that switches among wiretap coding, resolvability-assisted coding, and one-time-pad encryption, governed by per-state rate comparisons and the soft-covering exponent. The results provide design principles and performance bounds for secure ISAC in correlated channels, with a numerical BSC example illustrating the region transitions and the impact of resolvability on sensing privacy.

Abstract

Sensing privacy and communication confidentiality play fundamentally different but interconnected roles in adversarial wireless environments. Capturing this interplay within a single physical-layer framework is particularly challenging in integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems, where the same waveform simultaneously serves dual purposes. We study a secure ISAC system in which a monostatic transmitter simultaneously sends a confidential message to a legitimate receiver and senses an environmental state, while a passive adversary attempts both message decoding and state estimation. We partially characterize the fundamental trade-offs among three performance measures: the transmitter's secrecy rate, its detection exponent, and the adversary's detection exponent. Beyond the joint input distribution that governs overall performance, the trade-offs are further shaped by the transmitter's ability to extract keys via feedback and hide both the content and structure of the codewords via wiretap and resolvability codes. We derive an achievable region, and illustrate the resulting design trade-offs through a numerical example.

Secure Integrated Sensing and Communication against Communication and Sensing Eavesdropping

TL;DR

This work develops an information-theoretic framework for secure ISAC under a fixed environmental state, combining sequential decision-making, feedback-enabled key generation, and state-aware coding. It reveals a fundamental trade-off between secrecy rate and sensing/security exponents, and proves an achievable region that incorporates three operating modes: sensing-security optimization, resolvability-based secrecy with preserved sensing, and open-loop secrecy with minimal state leakage. The approach leverages a block-based adaptive policy that switches among wiretap coding, resolvability-assisted coding, and one-time-pad encryption, governed by per-state rate comparisons and the soft-covering exponent. The results provide design principles and performance bounds for secure ISAC in correlated channels, with a numerical BSC example illustrating the region transitions and the impact of resolvability on sensing privacy.

Abstract

Sensing privacy and communication confidentiality play fundamentally different but interconnected roles in adversarial wireless environments. Capturing this interplay within a single physical-layer framework is particularly challenging in integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems, where the same waveform simultaneously serves dual purposes. We study a secure ISAC system in which a monostatic transmitter simultaneously sends a confidential message to a legitimate receiver and senses an environmental state, while a passive adversary attempts both message decoding and state estimation. We partially characterize the fundamental trade-offs among three performance measures: the transmitter's secrecy rate, its detection exponent, and the adversary's detection exponent. Beyond the joint input distribution that governs overall performance, the trade-offs are further shaped by the transmitter's ability to extract keys via feedback and hide both the content and structure of the codewords via wiretap and resolvability codes. We derive an achievable region, and illustrate the resulting design trade-offs through a numerical example.
Paper Structure (12 sections, 5 theorems, 51 equations, 2 figures, 1 table)

This paper contains 12 sections, 5 theorems, 51 equations, 2 figures, 1 table.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Notation
  3. System Model and Main Results
  4. Numerical Example
  5. Proof of Theorem \ref{['achievability theorem']}
  6. Policy Description
  7. Encoding
  8. Stopping rule and Decoding
  9. Policy Analysis
  10. Achievable exponent analysis for transmitter and eavesdropper
  11. Secrecy and reliability analysis
  12. Achievable secrecy rate analysis

Key Result

Theorem 2

The following region is achievable: where$R_{\text{key}}(s) = \mathbb{H}_{P_{X,s}\circ W_{Y_1,Y_2|X,s}}(Y_1|X,Y_2)$, $R_1(s) = \mathbb{I}(P_{X,s};W_{Y_1|X,s})$, $R_2(s) = \mathbb{I}(P_{X,s};W_{Y_2|X,s})$. $\mathcal{P}_{res}$is the resolvability region defined as is the soft covering exponentyagli2019exact.

Figures (2)

  • Figure 1: System Model
  • Figure 2: Illustration of Secrecy Privacy Tradeoffs in secure ISAC

Theorems & Definitions (7)

  • Definition 1
  • Theorem 2
  • Lemma 3
  • Lemma 4
  • Lemma 5
  • proof
  • Lemma 6