RIS-Assisted ISAC Systems for Robust Secure Transmission With Imperfect Sense Estimation

In this paper, we investigate reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems for robust physical layer security (PLS) schemes. Traditionally, eavesdroppers (Eves) typically avoid interacting with the base station, making it challenging to obtain their relevant information, which limits the implementation of PLS. Fortunately, the sensing information obtained by ISAC can contribute to the design of PLS. Therefore, leveraging imperfect sensing estimation and employing dedicated radar signals as artificial noise, we formulate an RIS-assisted joint active and passive beamforming design problem to maximize the sum secrecy rate while satisfying the user’s quality of service constraints, the transmission power constraints, and the sensing signal strength requirements. To make the problem tractable, we first derive the bound for Eve’s channel state information uncertainty region based on security approximations. Subsequently, we employ the $\mathcal {S}$ -procedure and the symbolic-deterministic methods to transform the infinite number of inequalities. We then utilize the first-order Taylor expansion, the second-order cone methods, and the successive convex approximation to address the nonconvexity problem, leading to an efficient suboptimal solution obtained by an iterative algorithm. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate the significant potential of the sensing function in enhancing security and the effectiveness of the proposed robust scheme in flexibly balancing communication and sensing quality.