Dual Target-Mounted RISs-Assisted ISAC Against Eavesdropping and Malicious Interference
This addresses security vulnerabilities in next-generation wireless networks for applications like UAV-based communications, though it is incremental as it builds on existing RIS and ISAC frameworks.
The study tackled security threats in integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems by proposing a dual target-mounted RISs-assisted scheme to counter eavesdropping and malicious interference from hostile UAVs, achieving improved secrecy rates and sensing performance as validated through simulations.
The synergy between integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) unlocks novel applications and advanced services for next-generation wireless networks, yet also introduces new security challenges. In this study, a novel dual target-mounted RISs-assisted ISAC scheme is proposed, where a base station with ISAC capability performs sensing of two unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) targets, one of which is legitimate and the other is eavesdropper, while communicating with the users through an RIS mounted on the legitimate UAV target. The proposed scheme addresses dual security threats posed by a hostile UAV target: eavesdropping on legitimate user communications and random interference attacks launched by a malicious RIS mounted on this eavesdropper UAV target, aiming to disrupt secure transmissions. Moreover, malicious RIS interference is also optimized for a worst-case scenario, in which both the channel state information (CSI) and the transmit beamforming of the base station are assumed to be fully compromised by a malicious RIS-mounted eavesdropper UAV. A non-convex optimization problem maximizing the secrecy rate of the users is formulated, and a semi-definite relaxation (SDR)-based two-stage solution is developed to optimize the transmit beamforming matrix of the base station and the phase shift coefficients of the legitimate RIS. Extensive computer simulations are conducted to evaluate the robustness of the proposed solution under various system configurations. The proposed system's communication performance is assessed using the secrecy rate metric, while the sensing performance is evaluated through the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio and the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) for angle-of-departure (AoD) estimation of the eavesdropper UAV target.