Episode 283 – 6G a paradigm shift and physical layer security

Dr. Arsenia Chorti is a Professor at ENSEA (École Nationale Supérieure de l’Électronique et de ses Applications, Paris, France) and a Visiting Research Fellow at Princeton University. She is also the Head of the Information, Communications and Imaging (ICI) Group of the ETIS Lab. 

She is also a chartered engineer from the Technical Chambers of Greece, and a member of the IEEE P1951.1 Working Group on Smart Cities Standardization, the IEEE INGR Working Group on Security, and the IEEE P1940 Standardization Workgroup on Standard profiles for ISO 8583 authentication services.

Her research spans the areas of wireless communications and the design of security schemes for 5G and 6G with a particular focus on physical layer security, including context aware security, wireless security, 6G and IoT, intrusion detection in IoT networks and machine learning for communications.

In this podcast, Professor Chorti gives an introduction on 6G, and how the sheer scale of applications and network delivering on a full range of diverse requirements – data rate, latency, energy and complexity constraints – will power “networks that for the first time, can ‘see’, ‘hear’ and ‘sense’.” 

She cautioned how the nature of information will change, such as the volume of sensitive and private data transmitted over the air, and how the heterogeneous nature of 6G networks requires a rethink of today’s security solutions built on cryptography.

Highlighting how existing protocols could be complemented by incorporating the physical characteristics of the wireless environment (“physical layer security”), she pointed out various areas of applications. These include device authentication using the physical location information of the device, distilling entropy available in the wireless medium to generate keys. Additionally, the risks of existing physical layer attacks such as jamming would increase under 6G, and security measures would likely rely on physical layer solution.

Interview by Jane Lo, Singapore Correspondent. Recorded 3^rd September 2021, 4.30pm SGT/ 10.30am France.