Field of Expertise
Wireless communications, Internet of things, wireless security, device authentication, key generation
Expertise
Junqing Zhang is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Electronics, the University of Liverpool. His work mainly involves designing innovative and practical physical layer security solutions for future wireless technologies with ultra-low energy requirements but high security standards. He has been investigating wireless security solutions for the major Internet of Things (IoT) techniques, including IEEE 802.11a/g/ax, LoRa/LoRaWAN, Bluetooth, ZigBee, etc. IoT is featured with higher security requirements, limited computational and energy resources as well as the massive amount. The conventional security solutions rely on cryptography, which will be computationally expensive to many low cost IoT devices and cannot scale. Those IoT devices are thus not protected securely, which have resulted in numerous notorious cyberattacks and significant economic loss. The global IoT security market is expected to reach £27.59 billion by 2025. The research of Dr Zhang aims to solve the challenging security issues that IoT is facing. Specifically, his work exploits the unique and unpredictable characteristics of the wireless channels and device hardware as cryptographic keys and device identifiers, respectively, which are lightweight and affordable to the IoT. His group has built several demonstrations of the key generation and device authentication solutions, based on WiFi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, and LoRa.