# A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances and Future Trends

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.07919 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07919/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 29 May 2015.

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Artificial Intelligence for Satellite Communication: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10899/) (2021)
- [Semi-Supervised RF Fingerprinting with Consistency-Based Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14795/) (2023)
- [Internet-of-Things Devices and Assistive Technologies for Healthcare: Applications, Challenges, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14112/) (2021)
- [Enabling Deep Learning-based Physical-layer Secret Key Generation for FDD-OFDM Systems in Multi-Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03065/) (2022)
- [Towards Zero Touch Networks: Cross-Layer Automated Security Solutions for 6G Wireless Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20627/) (2025)
- [SafeCoop: Unravelling Full Stack Safety in Agentic Collaborative Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18123/) (2025)
- [Optimal Privacy Preserving for Federated Learning in Mobile Edge Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07166/) (2022)
- [Open-Set RF Fingerprinting via Improved Prototype Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13895/) (2023)
- [Adversarial Network Optimization under Bandit Feedback: Maximizing Utility in Non-Stationary Multi-Hop Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16215/) (2024)
- [Exploiting Radio Frequency Fingerprints for Device Identification: Tackling Cross-receiver Challenges in the Source-data-free Scenario](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16648/) (2025)
- [On the Use of CSI for the Generation of RF Fingerprints and Secret Keys](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15415/) (2021)
- [Federated Radio Frequency Fingerprinting with Model Transfer and Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11418/) (2023)
- [Data-driven classification of low-power communication signals by an unauthenticated user using a software-defined radio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04088/) (2023)
- [Protocol-agnostic and Data-free Backdoor Attacks on Pre-trained Models in RF Fingerprinting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00881/) (2025)
- [Generalizable and Interpretable RF Fingerprinting with Shapelet-Enhanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03035/) (2026)
- [RF Spectrogram Anomaly Detection with Quantum Kitchen Sinks: Architecture, Representation, and Hardware Validation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13897/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper examines the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity, confidentiality, integrity and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state-of-the-art in physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer. We also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their counter-measures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive jammer, adaptive jammer and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.