Security and Privacy in Molecular Communication and Networking: Opportunities and Challenges

Molecular Communication (MC) is an emerging and promising communication paradigm for several multi-disciplinary domains like bio-medical, industry and military. Differently to the traditional communication paradigm, the information is encoded on the molecules, that are then used as carriers of information. Novel approaches related to this new communication paradigm have been proposed, mainly focusing on architectural aspects and categorization of potential applications. So far, security and privacy aspects related to the molecular communication systems have not been investigated at all and represent an open question that need to be addressed. The main motivation of this paper lies on providing some first insights about security and privacy aspects of MC systems, by highlighting the open issues and challenges and above all by outlining some specific directions of potential solutions. Existing cryptographic methods and security approaches are not suitable for MC systems since do not consider the pecific issues and challenges, that need ad-hoc solutions. We will discuss directions in terms of potential solutions by trying to highlight the main advantages and potential drawbacks for each direction considered. We will try to answer to the main questions: 1) why this solution can be exploited in the MC field to safeguard the system and its reliability? 2) which are the main issues related to the specific approach? .