Beamforming and Phase Shift Design for STAR-RIS-Assisted Secure Sensing and Communication in ISAC Systems

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), as a rapidly advancing technique, introduces a fresh approach for achieving secure communication and intelligent sensing for future wireless networks. An ISAC framework empowered by simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (STAR-RIS) is explored in this paper, where a base station equipped with multiple antennas establishes wireless links to users each with a single antenna during the detection of a point target. The point target, regarded as an eavesdropper, trying to intercept users’ information. Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) serves as evaluation criterion to assess sensing accuracy of point eavesdropper, whereas the secrecy rate is employed to quantify the security level of the communication link. To optimize sensing-communication tradeoff, a joint optimization problem is constructed. To approach the formulated problem, a hybrid Block Coordinate Descent (BCD)-based algorithm is developed, which alternately updates the transmission beamforming and STAR-RIS phase shifts, using successive convex approximation (SCA) technique, penalty dual decomposition (PDD) framework and projected gradient method (PGM).