Security in nano communication: Challenges and open research issues

Nano communication is one of the fastest growing emerging research fields. In recent years, much progress has been achieved in developing nano machines supporting our needs in health care and other scenarios. However, experts agree that only the interaction among nano machines allows to address the very complex requirements in the field. Drug delivery and environmental control are only two of the many interesting application domains, which, at the same time, pose many new challenging problems. Very relevant communication concepts have been investigated such as RF radio communication in the terra hertz band or molecular communication based on transmitter molecules. Yet, one question has not been considered so far and that is nano communication security, i.e., will it be possible to protect such systems from manipulation by malicious parties? Our objective is to provide some first insights into the security challenges and to highlight some of the open research challenges in this field. The main observation is that especially for molecular communication existing security and cryptographic solutions might not be applicable. In this context, we coin the term biochemical cryptography that might lead to significant improvements in the field of molecular communication. We also point to relevant problems that have similarities with typical network architectures but also completely new challenges.