Collaborative Research: NSF-DFG: SaTC 2.0: RES: Toward Zero Trust Wireless Integrated Sensing and Communication Systems

An integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system design is important for delivering the quality-of-service needs of emerging wireless services (e.g., digital twins) over 5G and beyond cellular systems. Although ISAC system design provides a variety of benefits (e.g., spectrum efficiency, and reduced hardware complexity), it introduces several unique privacy and security challenges due to their dual-purpose nature (i.e., using one signal for both sensing and data transmission) and shared resources (e.g., frequency and hardware). First, ISAC signals used for both sensing and communication can be intercepted to extract sensitive information, such as environmental data or user location. Second, attackers can tamper with sensing signals to deliver false data or manipulate the communication link, disrupting system operations. To address these challenges, this project develops privacy-preserving and secure ISAC system. The project's broader significance and importance are transforming wireless systems into multi-functional networks and improving the security and privacy ISAC systems. The project integrates research insights into new networking courses and hosts outreach activities. The US-Germany collaboration will foster an international transfer of expertise across the aforementioned areas, thus ensuring broad societal and technological impacts. The joint US-Germany project develops a holistic zero trust ISAC framework that utilizes radio frequency based communication and sensing functions for confidentiality preservation, transmitter and receiver secure authentication, and data communication privacy protection via 1) designing a novel secure authentication framework to ensure the integrity of wireless ISAC devices in zero trust environments; 2) creating a suite of effective tools to achieve the confidential wireless channel to conceal sensitive information, even when an eavesdropper knows the keying information for encoding; 3) developing novel information bottleneck and neural network based data transmission system for both sensing and communication data privacy protection; 4) building an open-source software platform and hardware testbed to validate the zero trust wireless ISAC solutions. This project provides a rich environment and platform that facilitates educating and training students at multiple levels. 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.