M.Sc. Waqar Ahmed

Researcher

Contact Information

Pankratiusstr. 2
wahmed@wise.tu-darmstadt.de

Biography

(This profile is no longer maintained)

I have more than 9 years of industry experience as hardware design engineer. Currently I am working as researcher on prototyping of 5G mmWave on RFSOCs in accordance with the IEEE 802.11ad and 11ay standards. My previous work experience includes implementation of communication algorithms on Software defined Radio, for higher throughput and resilience between wireless nodes within hardware constraints. I have experience with RF synthesizers, external power amplifiers, high speed DACs and ADCs. I worked as lead FPGA engineer with team of algorithm designers and embedded software engineers. I was also involved in designing and implementation of Key Management System (KMS), where my responsibilities included implementation, verification and debugging of GCM-AES in FPGA and integration of black box with 3rd party.

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.