EAGER: SARE: Dynamic Phase Center Antennas for Secure Sensing and Communications

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The rapid increase in the use of wireless devices in commercial products for sensing and communications has led to significant societal improvements. However, every wireless connection, whether for sensing or communications, represents a potential access point for security threats, whether malicious or accidental. Vulnerabilities that are well-known to the military sensing community, such as jamming, interference, and spoofing, are increasingly becoming potential vulnerabilities for commercial sensors, from automotive networks and radar, to in-home sensors, to body-worn gesture recognition radars. Beyond this, hacking threats have been evolving, with researchers demonstrating the ability to control vehicles remotely through the wireless communications channels on modern vehicles. To address these emerging challenges of wireless security, this project will investigate a novel approach to mitigate vulnerabilities at the physical layer by using dynamic antennas. By dynamically moving the phase centers of antennas in space and time, the information transmitted and received by the antenna can be filtered at the physical layer, significantly reducing the impact of malicious signals before they enter the wireless system. The goal of this research is to investigate new methods of physical layer security of sensing and communication systems through dynamic modulation of antenna phase centers. Prior work by the principal investigator has demonstrated the ability of dynamic antenna arrays to support directional modulation; this research will explore the concept at the antenna level and develop novel antenna structures with phase center dynamics. The effort has the following objectives: 1) explore the theoretical foundations of phase center dynamics in antennas; 2) design and develop new dynamic antennas jointly with signal processing in wireless systems; 3) demonstrate additional security in sensing and wireless communications provided by dynamic antennas. This research will develop new theoretical foundations for dynamic antennas, potentially leading to new design concepts and new areas of study in the field of applied electromagnetics. Through an inherently interdisciplinary approach, the work will focus on wireless system security design from a holistic viewpoint, including the electromagnetic aperture, the transceiver system, and signal processing, leading to potentially new ways of designing and characterizing wireless systems.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.