Cybersecurity is a one of the most pressing issues in technology development and deployment today, and is a serious societal concern. Wireless networks are particularly challenging in this regard. The Internet of Things is an emerging aspect of wireless communications, which is expected to interconnect hundreds of billions of devices, spanning home, vehicular, and industrial environments. These devices will be used for applications ranging from autonomous vehicles to health care. The complexity, extent and range of applications envisioned for the Internet of Things make it especially vulnerable to cyber-attack, while at the same time making it particularly difficult to protect from such attacks using traditional methods. Furthermore, the massive number of these devices, the low power available to them, the limited hardware of which they will be comprised, and the lack of traditional infrastructure to connect them, also pose severe technical challenges to the use of traditional methods of cyber security in this setting. This study aims to develop a new security paradigm for the Internet of Things, in which the physical properties of the radiofrequency environment are used to enhance the security of communications between devices. This work represents a completely new approach to communications security in the Internet of Things, which has far-reaching implications on the ability of these technologies to be deployed in a greater number of security-sensitive applications. Thus, this research has the potential to transform cybersecurity in an environment that is sure to become a major part of our information infrastructure in the coming years.
The proposed work will address critical issues in Internet of Things security, which are based on the defining aspects of the Internet of Things: short-packet communication, massive and widely distributed deployment, and large-scale data collection. Physical-layer security methods, which exploit resources in the transmission medium to guarantee secure communication against eavesdroppers, are promising solutions to address the challenges posed in securing the Internet of Things. This exploratory study will consider the potential of physical-layer-security principles for application in the Internet of Things. Three main thrusts are envisioned: secure transmission of short packets; secure function computation; and scaling laws for secrecy capacity in Internet of Things networks. Short packets are a critical part of Internet of Things applications such as vehicle-to-vehicle communications, alerting systems, and sensor networks. Much work on physical layer security has focused on the classical Shannon regime of infinite block-length, which is not suitable for such applications. Thus, developing an understanding of the fundamentals of physical layer security in the short block-length regime is a critical step in applying such methods to the Internet of Things. The Internet of Things is also associated with very large distributed data applications, in which the Internet of Things terminals are sensors generating large amount of spatially distributed data. In such situations, reliable and secure computation from such data is an important aspect of cyber-security in Internet of Things applications. Therefore, developing techniques to do so is a critical step in the development of secure spatially distributed sensing systems. Moreover, scaling laws have been an important part of the understanding of the capabilities of large-scale wireless networks, such as the Internet of Things. Determining how secrecy capacity scales in such networks will lead to a greater understanding of the fundamental ability of Internet of Things to support secure communication, and can thereby guide the development of secure protocols and coding schemes for Internet of Things applications.
