Restricting passive attacks in 6G vehicular networks: a physical layer security perspective

The utilization of current wireless technologies in intelligent transportation systems confirms the massive connectivity with sufficient data rate. With the increasing amenities, the possibilities of passive attacks are also increased which may compromise the user's transmission. To handle such scenarios, physical layer security can be employed to secure the transmission. This paper provides insights into the performance of outage probability (OP), and secrecy outage probability (SOP) for 6G enabled vehicular networks under the influence of passive eavesdroppers. As a component of 6G infrastructure, the work considers the vehicular to infrastructure scenario with re-configurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) instead of power-hungry roadside units. Each vehicle and passive eavesdropper are equipped with dual antennas. In that particular direction, at first, this work derives the analytical expressions of received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) under impact of mobility for 6G vehicular networks. By utilising the expressions of SNR, we derive the closed-form expressions of first order secrecy metrics for example, outage probability and secrecy outage probability. The expressions of SNR have been derived for two initial locations (near and far from the legitimate transmitter) of legitimate receiver. The derived expressions are helpful to design and simulate the secrecy systems for vehicular networks because of their robustness towards road parameters, and signal parameters. At last we conclude that it is advantageous to have the RIS element instead of regular access point to save the extra transmission power as no major fluctuations have been noticed in the performance of secrecy metrics under the influence of RIS.