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

Modern wireless technologies confirm the massive connectivity with sufficient data rate in intelligent transportation systems. Passive attacks may compromise the user's transmission with increased amenities. Physical layer security can protect transmissions. The paper investigates outage probability (OP) and secrecy outage probability (SOP) for 6G enabled vehicular networks with passive eavesdroppers. The work considers the vehicular to infrastructure scenario with re configurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) instead of power-hungry roadside units. The vehicles and passive eavesdroppers are equipped with dual antennas. Specifically, for 6G vehicular networks, this work presents the analytical expressions for the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). We derive first-order secrecy metrics, such as outage probability and secrecy outage probability, from SNR expressions. We have derived SNR expressions for two initial receiver locations (near and far from the legitimate). Due to their robustness towards road parameters and signal parameters, the developed expressions aid in designing and simulating secrecy systems. We conclude that RIS can be more effective than regular access points because no major fluctuations have been observed in secrecy metrics under the influence of RIS.