In a report published Nov. 22 in Nature Electronics, the researchers describe how they developed a new millimeter-wave wireless microchip that allows secure wireless transmissions to prevent interception without reducing latency, efficiency and speed of the 5G network. The technique should make it very challenging to eavesdrop on such high-frequency wireless transmissions, even with multiple colluding bad actors. Instead of relying on encryption, the Princeton method shapes the transmission itself to foil would-be eavesdroppers.
To explain this, it helps to picture wireless transmissions as they emerge from an array of antennas. With a single antenna, radio waves radiate from the antenna in a wave. When there are multiple antennas working as an array, these waves interfere with each other like waves of water in a pond. The interference increases the size of some wave crests and troughs and smooths out others. An array of antennas is able to use this interference to direct a transmission along a defined path. But besides the main transmission, there are secondary paths. These secondary paths are weaker than the main transmission, but in a typical system they contain the exact same signal as the main path. By tapping these paths, potential eavesdroppers can compromise the transmission.
The team realized they could foil eavesdroppers by making the signal at the eavesdroppers' location appear almost as noise. They do this by chopping up the message randomly and assigning different parts of the message to subsets of antennas in the array. The researchers were able to coordinate the transmission so that only a receiver in the intended direction would be able to assemble the signal in the correct order. Everywhere else, the chopped up signals arrive in a manner that appear noise-like. The team created the entire end-to-end system in a silicon chip that is manufactured by standard silicon foundry processing.
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-11-chip-wireless-messages-plain-sight.html
To explain this, it helps to picture wireless transmissions as they emerge from an array of antennas. With a single antenna, radio waves radiate from the antenna in a wave. When there are multiple antennas working as an array, these waves interfere with each other like waves of water in a pond. The interference increases the size of some wave crests and troughs and smooths out others. An array of antennas is able to use this interference to direct a transmission along a defined path. But besides the main transmission, there are secondary paths. These secondary paths are weaker than the main transmission, but in a typical system they contain the exact same signal as the main path. By tapping these paths, potential eavesdroppers can compromise the transmission.
The team realized they could foil eavesdroppers by making the signal at the eavesdroppers' location appear almost as noise. They do this by chopping up the message randomly and assigning different parts of the message to subsets of antennas in the array. The researchers were able to coordinate the transmission so that only a receiver in the intended direction would be able to assemble the signal in the correct order. Everywhere else, the chopped up signals arrive in a manner that appear noise-like. The team created the entire end-to-end system in a silicon chip that is manufactured by standard silicon foundry processing.
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-11-chip-wireless-messages-plain-sight.html
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