Afifa Ishtiaq, M.Sc.

PhD Researcher / Researcher

Contact Information

Secure Mobile Networking Lab
Pankratiusstraße 2
64289 Darmstadt
aishtiaq@wise.tu-darmstadt.de
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Biography

Afifa Ishtiaq is an FPGA Engineer and PhD candidate at Technische Universität Darmstadt, specializing in FPGA-based accelerators for modern communication technologies. Previously, her work focuses on secure techniques in post-quantum cryptography and wireless communications, particularly in developing and optimizing custom FPGA designs. At TU Darmstadt, Afifa Ishtiaq contributes to research on mmWave physical layer security with a focus on standard-complaint real-time practical solutions.

Publications

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2023 Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS 2023) Conference

BeamSec: A Practical mmWave Physical Layer Security Scheme Against Strong Adversaries

Afifa Ishtiaq Arash Asadi Ladan Khaloopour Waqar Ahmed Vahid Jamali Matthias Hollick

BibTeX DOI: 10.1109/CNS59707.2023.10289003

Abstract

The high directionality of millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication systems has proven effective in reducing the attack surface against eavesdropping, thus improving the physical layer security. However, even with highly directional beams, the system is still exposed to eavesdropping against adversaries located within the main lobe. In this paper, we propose BeamSec, a solution to protect the users even from adversaries located in the main lobe. The key feature of BeamSec are: (i) Operating without the knowledge of eavesdropper’s location/channel; (ii) Robustness against colluding eavesdropping attack and (iii) Standard compatibility, which we prove using experiments via our IEEE 802.11ad/ay-compatible 60 GHz phased-array testbed. Methodologically, BeamSec first identifies uncorrelated and diverse beampairs between the transmitter and receiver by analyzing signal characteristics available through standard-compliant procedures. Next, it encodes the information jointly over all selected beampairs to minimize information leakage. We study two methods for allocating transmission time among different beams, namely uniform allocation (no knowledge of the wireless channel) and optimal allocation for maximization of the secrecy rate (with partial knowledge of the wireless channel). Our experiments show that BeamSec outperforms the benchmark schemes against single and colluding eavesdroppers and enhances the secrecy rate by 79.8% over a random paths selection benchmark.