Security in Visible Light Communication: Novel Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

As LED lighting becomes increasingly ubiquitous, Visible Light Communication is attracting the interest of academia and industry as a complement to RF as the physical layer for the Internet of Things. Aside from its much greater spectral availability compared to RF, visible light has several attractive properties that may promote its uptake: its lack of health risks, its opportunities for spatial reuse, its relative immunity to multipath fading, its lack of electromagnetic interference, and its inherently secure nature: differently from RF, light does not penetrate through walls. In this paper, we outline the security implications of Visible Light Communication, review the existing contributions to this under-explored space, and survey the research opportunities that we envision for the near future.

Keywords

• Visible light communication
• Security.