Conference: Workshop on Spectrum/Waveform-aware Wireless Security

Wireless communication has advanced significantly in recent decades, resulting in complex and heterogeneous networks in public, private, and defense sectors. However, the growth of wireless cyberspace has also led to an increase in security threats and actual attacks. As a result, research and development on wireless security have become a focus across academic, government, and industry sectors. Proactive and autonomous defenses have emerged as promising countermeasures, but research in extremely complex wireless networks and spectrum access security remains under-explored. The workshop’s novelty is its aim to fill the research gap by providing a vibrant forum for multi-disciplinary leading researchers and practitioners to discuss critical cyber threats facing complex wireless systems and spectrum security and to propose countermeasures leveraging new concepts such as enhanced wireless situational awareness. The workshop's broader significance and importance lie in its potential to help the research community better understand the need for securing wireless communications and spectrum access, and to propose proactive and autonomous defenses in wireless networks operating in challenging environments or even contested space for DoD applications. The workshop's technical sessions are organized around different aspects of leveraging software-defined radios (SDRs) for spectrum/waveform-aware wireless security designs. The progress in SDR technology and the rise of collaborative and opportunistic access to the limited radio frequency (RF) spectrum have opened opportunities for both wireless system defenders and attackers. Attackers can exploit SDR devices to devise optimal attack strategies, while defenders will try best to identify attacked spectrum bands and adversarial waveforms to secure subsequent transmissions. Both sides can harness recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to intensify the battle in the intricate wireless cyberspace. The workshop will be attended by renowned researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government agencies, spanning various fields such as cybersecurity, wireless communications and networking, information theory, IoT systems, AI and machine learning, communication software-hardware co-design, and fog/edge computing. The workshop discussion will focus on the defense side on being aware of future sophisticate attacks. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.