2024/03/15 by Majid H. Khoshafa, Khoshafa, Majid H., Omar Maraqa +13 · 9 citations
Computer Science · Engineering · #Coding theory and cryptography #Cryptographic Implementations and Security #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Information Theory (cs.IT) #Signal Processing (eess.SP) #electronic engineering #graph theory and CDMA systems #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2403.10412
openalex publication_date 2024/03/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Physical layer security (PLS) has received a growing interest from the research community for its ability to safeguard data confidentiality without relying on key distribution or encryption/decryption. However, the evolution towards the 5G technology and beyond poses new security challenges that must be addressed in order to fulfill the unprecedented performance requirements of future wireless networks. Among the potential enabling technologies, RIS has attracted extensive attention due to its ability to proactively and intelligently reconfigure the wireless propagation environment to combat dynamic wireless channel impairments. Consequently, the RIS technology can be adopted to improve the information-theoretic security of both RF and OWC systems. This survey paper provides a comprehensive overview of the information-theoretic security of RIS-based RF and optical systems. The article first discusses the fundamental concepts of PLS and RIS technologies, followed by their combination in both RF and OWC systems. Subsequently, some optimization techniques are presented in the context of the underlying system model, followed by an assessment of the impact of RIS-assisted PLS through a comprehensive performance analysis. Given that the computational complexity of future communication systems that adopt RIS-assisted PLS is likely to increase rapidly as the number of interactions between the users and infrastructure grows, ML is seen as a promising approach to address this complexity issue while sustaining or improving the network performance. A discussion of recent research studies on RIS-assisted PLS-based systems embedded with ML is presented. Furthermore, some important open research challenges are proposed and discussed to provide insightful future research directions, with the aim of moving a step closer towards the development and implementation of the forthcoming 6G wireless technology.