Available Technologies

Executive Summary

Wireless communications are carried on electromagnetic waves that travel through physical space between a transmitter and receiver. This represents a potential area of vulnerability whereby eavesdroppers may ‘listening in’ to this data if they’re within range of the signal’s transmitter. Various approaches have been taking to increase the security of the wireless signal and mitigate eavesdropping or jamming such as physical-layer, beamforming and artificial noise. However, all of these approaches have challenges such as requiring knowledge of the physical location of the unintended receiver, pre-sharing of encryption keys, or complex circuitry and hardware. This makes existing technologies difficult to implement on existing wireless devices without significant adaptation. Researchers at Michigan State University have developed a new method securing wireless communications which provides exceptional security for a low hardware and throughput cost, especially for tasks where heavy-duty encryption may be too computationally taxing.

Description of the Technology

The technology is based on “Spatial Pilot Perturbation” a technique resembling beam forming but with separate precoders for the pilot and data symbols. When the signals are received by the intended receiver, the signal can be decoded; however, when unintended eavesdroppers intercept the signal on different bands of frequency, the data cannot be demodulated. In a laboratory setting, the technique demonstrated a >99.8% reduction in the probability of a data packet being eavesdropped in 5G applications and a >99.1% reduction in Wi-Fi applications.

Benefits

• Can be implemented with existing 5G and WiFi client devices (e.g., cellphones and laptops)
• Can be implemented in devices that are unable to handle additional processing requirements (IoT)
• Does not require any knowledge about eavesdroppers
• Completely transparent and able to be combined with higher-level data security techniques such as encryption, firewalls, and VPN
• Requires less information to be effective than existing physical-layer techniques.
• Backwards compatible with 5G and Wi-Fi client devices

Applications

• Home Wi-Fi routing where heavy encryption is impractical
• Military ad hoc communication networks in battlefields
• Infrastructure-less vehicle-to-vehicle communications
• Internet of Things applications in which computationally intensive techniques degrade throughput by a significant margin
• Finance, industry, and defense applications where security is heavily prioritized over throughput.

Patent Status

• Patent pending

Licensing Rights

Full licensing rights available

Inventors

Dr. Huacheng Zeng

TECH ID

TEC2024-0040