Secure Joint Communication and Sensing
This addresses security challenges in joint communication and sensing systems, such as protecting sensitive attributes like location, but is incremental as it builds on existing channel models and secrecy frameworks.
The paper tackles the problem of preventing information leakage between communication and sensing in joint systems, developing a partial characterization of the secrecy-distortion region for a broadcast channel model with feedback and an eavesdropper, with exact results for degraded channels and demonstrated benefits over separation-based methods.
This work considers the problem of mitigating information leakage between communication and sensing in systems jointly performing both operations. Specifically, a discrete memoryless state-dependent broadcast channel model is studied in which (i) the presence of feedback enables a transmitter to convey information, while simultaneously performing channel state estimation; (ii) one of the receivers is treated as an eavesdropper whose state should be estimated but which should remain oblivious to part of the transmitted information. The model abstracts the challenges behind security for joint communication and sensing if one views the channel state as a sensitive attribute, e.g., location. For independent and identically distributed states, perfect output feedback, and when part of the transmitted message should be kept secret, a partial characterization of the secrecy-distortion region is developed. The characterization is exact when the broadcast channel is either physically-degraded or reversely-physically-degraded. The partial characterization is also extended to the situation in which the entire transmitted message should be kept secret. The benefits of a joint approach compared to separation-based secure communication and state-sensing methods are illustrated with a binary joint communication and sensing model.