João P. Vilela

Onur Günlü, Stefano Tomasin, João P. Vilela et al.

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is a promising feature of future communication networks. While spatial sensing can improve network performance and enable external services, it also creates privacy challenges that go beyond the confidentiality of communication content. Future networks using millimeter-wave (mmWave) and sub-terahertz (THz) frequencies may collect or infer detailed information about people, devices, bystanders, passive objects, and environments in a sixth-generation (6G) deployment area. Such sensing can reveal location and environment data, support behavioral profiling such as movement or activity recognition, and, in advanced cases, expose physiological information such as breathing frequency or heart-rate-related data. Thus, the capabilities of spatial sensing must be controlled to satisfy privacy requirements. In this work, we organize privacy-sensitive ISAC data into three sensing levels: location and environment data, behavioral data, and physiological data, and use this classification as the organizing principle throughout the paper. Based on this classification, we discuss internal and external ISAC applications, identify privacy challenges related to consent, transparency, data ownership, profiling, bystander exposure, and sensitive sensing data, review representative solution directions, and outline future research directions for privacy-preserving ISAC.

Willie K. Harrison, Dinis Sarmento, João P. Vilela et al.

In this paper we provide secrecy metrics applicable to physical-layer coding techniques with finite blocklengths over Gaussian and fading wiretap channel models. Our metrics go beyond some of the known practical secrecy measures, such as bit error rate and security gap, so as to make lower bound probabilistic guarantees on error rates over short blocklengths both preceding and following a secrecy decoder. Our techniques are especially useful in cases where application of traditional information-theoretic security measures is either impractical or simply not yet understood. The metrics can aid both practical system analysis, and practical system design for physical-layer security codes. Furthermore, these new measures fill a void in the current landscape of practical security measures for physical-layer security coding, and may assist in the wide-scale adoption of physical-layer techniques for security in real-world systems. We also show how the new metrics provide techniques for reducing realistic channel models to simpler discrete memoryless wiretap channel equivalents over which existing secrecy code designs may achieve information-theoretic security.