Abstract
As wireless networks move to millimetre-wave (mm-wave) and terahertz (THz) frequencies for 5G communications and beyond, ensuring security and resilience to eavesdropper attacks has become increasingly important. Traditional encryption methods are challenging to scale for high-bandwidth, ultralow-latency applications. An alternative approach is to use physical-layer techniques that rely on the physics of signal propagation to incorporate security features without the need for an explicit key exchange. Ensuring security through the use of directional, narrow-beam-like features of mm-wave/THz signals has proven to be vulnerable to passive eavesdroppers. Here we report a space-time modulation approach that ensures security by enforcing loss of information through selective spectral aliasing towards the direction of eavesdroppers, even though the channel can be physically static. This is achieved by using custom-designed spatio-temporal transmitter arrays realized in silicon chips with packaged antennas operating in the 71–76 GHz range. We also analytically and experimentally demonstrate the resilience of our links against distributed and synchronized eavesdropper attacks in the mm-wave band.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution
Access options
Access Nature and 54 other Nature Portfolio journals
Get Nature+, our best-value online-access subscription
$29.99 / 30 days
cancel any time
Subscribe to this journal
Receive 12 digital issues and online access to articles
$119.00 per year
only $9.92 per issue
Buy this article
- Purchase on Springer Link
- Instant access to full article PDF
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout
Similar content being viewed by others
Data availability
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.
References
Sengupta, K., Nagatsuma, T. & Mittleman, D. M. Terahertz integrated electronic and hybrid electronic–photonic systems. Nat. Electron. 1, 622–635 (2018).
Rappaport, T. S. et al. Millimeter wave mobile communications for 5G cellular: it will work! IEEE Access 1, 335–349 (2013).
Ahmad, I. et al. Overview of 5G security challenges and solutions. IEEE Commun. Stand. Mag. 2, 36–43 (2018).
Wu, X., Lu, H. & Sengupta, K. Programmable terahertz chip-scale sensing interface with direct digital reconfiguration at sub-wavelength scales. Nat. Commun. 10, 2722 (2019).
Venkatesh, S., Lu, X., Saeidi, H. & Sengupta, K. A high-speed programmable and scalable terahertz holographic metasurface based on tiled CMOS chips. Nat. Electron. 3, 785–793 (2020).
Sengupta, K. & Hajimiri, A. Designing optimal surface currents for efficient on-chip mm-wave radiators with active circuitry. IEEE Trans. Microw. Theory Tech. 64, 1976–1988 (2016).
Nagatsuma, T., Ducournau, G. & Renaud, C. C. Advances in terahertz communications accelerated by photonics. Nat. Photon. 10, 371–379 (2016).
Roh, W. et al. Millimeter-wave beamforming as an enabling technology for 5G cellular communications: theoretical feasibility and prototype results. IEEE Comm. Mag. 52, 106–113 (2014).
Rappaport, T. S. et al. Wireless communications and applications above 100 GHz: opportunities and challenges for 6G and beyond. IEEE Access 7, 78729–78757 (2019).
Dang, S., Amin, O., Shihada, B. & Alouini, M.-S. What should 6G be? Nat. Electron. 3, 20–29 (2020).
Sengupta, K. & Hajimiri, A. A 0.28 THz power-generation and beam-steering array in CMOS based on distributed active radiators. IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits 47, 3013–3031 (2012).
Saeidi, H. et al. 29.9 A 4 × 4 distributed multi-layer oscillator network for harmonic injection and THz beamforming with 14dBm EIRP at 416GHz in a lensless 65nm CMOS IC. In 2020 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) 256–258 (IEEE, 2020).
Sengupta, K. & Hajimiri, A. Mutual synchronization for power generation and beam-steering in CMOS with on-chip sense antennas near 200 GHz. IEEE Trans. Microw. Theory Tech. 63, 2867–2876 (2015).
Saeidi, H., Venkatesh, S., Lu, X. & Sengupta, K. 22.1 THz prism: one-shot simultaneous multi-node angular localization using spectrum-to-space mapping with 360-to-400GHz broadband transceiver and dual-port integrated leaky-wave antennas. In 2021 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) 314–316 (2021).
Ghosh, A., Maeder, A., Baker, M. & Chandramouli, D. 5G evolution: a view on 5G cellular technology beyond 3GPP release 15. IEEE Access 7, 127639–127651 (2019).
Poor, H. V. & Schaefer, R. F. Wireless physical layer security. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 114, 19–26 (2017).
Chen, K.-C., Zhang, T., Gitlin, R. D. & Fettweis, G. Ultra-low latency mobile networking. IEEE Netw. 33, 181–187 (2018).
Chen, H. et al. Ultra-reliable low latency cellular networks: use cases, challenges and approaches. IEEE Commun. Mag. 56, 119–125 (2018).
Bloessl, B., Sommer, C., Dressier, F. & Eckhoff, D. The scrambler attack: a robust physical layer attack on location privacy in vehicular networks. In 2015 International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC) 395–400 (IEEE, 2015).
Sadhu, B. et al. A 28-GHz 32-element TRX phased-array IC with concurrent dual-polarized operation and orthogonal phase and gain control for 5G communications. IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits 52, 3373–3391 (2017).
Shahramian, S., Holyoak, M., Singh, A., Farahani, B. J. & Baeyens, Y. A fully integrated scalable W-band phased-array module with integrated antennas, self-alignment and self-test. In 2018 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) 74–76 (2018).
Natarajan, A. et al. A fully-integrated 16-element phased-array receiver in SiGe BiCMOS for 60-GHz communications. IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits 46, 1059–1075 (2011).
Sowlati, T. et al. A 60-GHz 144-element phased-array transceiver for backhaul application. IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits 53, 3640–3659 (2018).
Ma, J. et al. Security and eavesdropping in terahertz wireless links. Nature 563, 89–93 (2018).
Maccartney, G. R., Rappaport, T. S., Sun, S. & Deng, S. Indoor office wideband millimeter-wave propagation measurements and channel models at 28 and 73 GHz for ultra-dense 5G wireless networks. IEEE Access 3, 2388–2424 (2015).
Ma, J., Shrestha, R., Moeller, L. & Mittleman, D. M. Invited article: channel performance for indoor and outdoor terahertz wireless links. APL Photonics 3, 051601 (2018).
Rivest, R. L., Shamir, A. & Adleman, L. A method for obtaining digital signatures and public-key cryptosystems. Commun. ACM 21, 120–126 (1978).
Shiu, Y., Chang, S. Y., Wu, H., Huang, S. C. & Chen, H. Physical layer security in wireless networks: a tutorial. IEEE Wireless Commun. 18, 66–74 (2011).
Wu, Y. et al. A survey of physical layer security techniques for 5G wireless networks and challenges ahead. IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun. 36, 679–695 (2018).
Yang, N. et al. Safeguarding 5G wireless communication networks using physical layer security. IEEE Comm. Mag. 53, 20–27 (2015).
Chen, J. et al. A digitally modulated mm-wave cartesian beamforming transmitter with quadrature spatial combining. In 2013 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference Digest of Technical Papers 232–233 (IEEE, 2013).
Hamamreh, J. M., Furqan, H. M. & Arslan, H. Classifications and applications of physical layer security techniques for confidentiality: a comprehensive survey. IEEE Commun. Surveys Tuts. 21, 1773–1828 (2018).
Chen, X., Ng, D. W. K., Gerstacker, W. H. & Chen, H.-H. A survey on multiple-antenna techniques for physical layer security. IEEE Commun. Surveys Tuts. 19, 1027–1053 (2016).
Wyner, A. D. The wire-tap channel. Bell Syst. Tech. J. 54, 1355–1387 (1975).
Barros, J. & Rodrigues, M. R. D. Secrecy capacity of wireless channels. In 2006 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory 356–360 (IEEE, 2006).
Shanks, H. & Bickmore, R. Four-dimensional electromagnetic radiators. Can. J. Phys. 37, 263–275 (1959).
Valliappan, N., Lozano, A. & Heath, R. W. Antenna subset modulation for secure millimeter-wave wireless communication. IEEE Trans. Commun. 61, 3231–3245 (2013).
Alotaibi, N. N. & Hamdi, K. A. Switched phased-array transmission architecture for secure millimeter-wave wireless communication. IEEE Trans. Commun. 64, 1303–1312 (2016).
Eltayeb, M. E., Choi, J., Al-Naffouri, T. Y. & Heath, R. W. Enhancing secrecy with multiantenna transmission in millimeter wave vehicular communication systems. IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol. 66, 8139–8151 (2017).
Ju, Y., Zhu, Y., Wang, H.-M., Pei, Q. & Zheng, H. Artificial noise hopping: a practical secure transmission technique with experimental analysis for millimeter wave systems. IEEE Syst. J. 14, 5121–5132 (2020).
Rusu, C., González-Prelcic, N. & Heath, R. W. An attack on antenna subset modulation for millimeter wave communication. In 2015 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2914–2918 (IEEE, 2015).
Babakhani, A., Rutledge, D. B. & Hajimiri, A. Transmitter architectures based on near-field direct antenna modulation. IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits 43, 2674–2692 (2008).
Lu, X., Venkatesh, S., Tang, B. & Sengupta, K. 4.6 Space-time modulated 71-to-76GHz mm-wave transmitter array for physically secure directional wireless links. In 2020 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) 86–88 (IEEE, 2020).
Zhu, Q., Yang, S., Yao, R. & Nie, Z. Directional modulation based on 4-D antenna arrays. IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag. 62, 621–628 (2014).
Hong, T., Song, M. & Liu, Y. RF directional modulation technique using a switched antenna array for physical layer secure communication applications. Prog. Electromagn. Res. 116, 363–379 (2011).
Guo, J. et al. Time-modulated arrays for physical layer secure communications: optimization-based synthesis and experimental assessment. IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag. 66, 6939–6949 (2018).
Jeon, S. et al. A scalable 6-to-18 GHz concurrent dual-band quad-beam phased-array receiver in CMOS. IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits 43, 2660–2673 (2008).
Li, H., Han, L., Duan, R. & Garner, G. M. Analysis of the synchronization requirements of 5G and corresponding solutions. IEEE Comm. Stand. Mag. 1, 52–58 (2017).
Gao, Z., Dai, L., Dai, W., Shim, B. & Wang, Z. Structured compressive sensing-based spatio-temporal joint channel estimation for FDD massive MIMO. IEEE Trans. Commun. 64, 601–617 (2015).
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the Army Research Office, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for funding support and all the members of IMRL for technical discussions.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
S.V. and X.L. conceived the experiments and design. X.L., S.V. and B.T. performed the circuit simulations, layout design and chip assembly, as well as conducted the measurements and analysed the results. K.S. supervised the experiments. S.V., X.L. and K.S. wrote the manuscript, and all the authors reviewed the manuscript.
Corresponding authors
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Peer review information Nature Electronics thanks Stepan Lucyszyn and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary information
Supplementary Information
Supplementary Figs. 1–15.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Venkatesh, S., Lu, X., Tang, B. et al. Secure space–time-modulated millimetre-wave wireless links that are resilient to distributed eavesdropper attacks. Nat Electron 4, 827–836 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-021-00664-z
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-021-00664-z
This article is cited by
-
Terahertz Beam Steering: from Fundamentals to Applications
Journal of Infrared, Millimeter, and Terahertz Waves (2023)
-
Intelligent metasurfaces: control, communication and computing
eLight (2022)