Physical layer security and privacy

I am senior editor of IEEE Trans. Information Forensics and Security since 2020 for the EDICS Communications and Information-theoretic Security and have a corresponding broad expertise in this domain. The following discusses a two themes relevant for security & service provision but also wireless communications and signal processing.

Specific relevant expertise are optimal transmit strategies for multi-antenna systems with joint sum and per-antenna power constraints. In particular "Optimal Transmit Strategies for Gaussian MISO Wiretap Channels," T-IFS 2019 is very interesting for security-enhancing scheduling strategies since we characterise the optimal beam forming strategies to achieve physical layer security, which is based on prior MISO solutions in T-SP 2016. We used our results also to characterise optimal transmit strategies for hardware limited large scale multi-antenna systems with sub-connected architectures, e.g. CL 2018. Our insights in the optimisation problem can be extended to include more constraints or algorithmic simplifications to solutions with reduced complexity (the complexity of the current solution is already acceptable). Incorporation of this in transmit strategies would enhance the security of the system on the physical layer by ensuring a low SNR/SINR at unintended receivers.

Privacy-by-design and privacy risk assessment - our new notion of pointwise maximal leakage (arXiv:2205.04935) provides a robust and operational privacy measure that has good analytical properties so that it can be easily included in privacy-by design approaches where the privacy risk is directly included in the design e.g. joint communication and sensing problems, but also other IoT applications and (distributed) statistical learning. It is more beneficial than DP since it is more flexible so that a higher utility can be achieved.. Application of this novel privacy measure in the telecommunication domain would be very timely and expected to be fruitful.