Security-Aware Pinching-Antenna Systems (PASS): Physical-Layer Security Transmission

Abstract

This paper investigates heterogeneous secure multi-user transmission in pinching-antenna systems (PASS), where dynamically adjustable pinching antennas reshape both guided-wave and free-space propagation to improve communication and confidentiality performance. Unlike conventional physical-layer security designs that represent different security requirements merely through weights or thresholds, heterogeneous services may change the logical role of each receiver for each information stream. To address this issue, we establish a unified role-dependent PASS transmission framework comprising low-, medium-, and high-security modes. These modes respectively maximize the minimum legitimate-user rate, protect confidential streams against external eavesdroppers, and further prevent non-target legitimate users from intercepting unauthorized information. The resulting joint optimization of information beamforming, artificial noise, and pinching-antenna positions is formulated as a long-horizon continuous-control problem. Two learning-based controllers are then developed to provide complementary complexity-performance tradeoffs. First, heterogeneous security-aware proximal policy optimization (HSPPO) directly transforms mode-specific rate and secrecy violations into normalized smooth feedback embedded in the proximal-policy-optimization advantage, enabling lightweight and violation-sensitive control. Second, multi-relational hierarchy-aware diffusion policy optimization (MRHA-DPO) combines a PASS-aware multi-relational graph encoder, a graph-conditioned hierarchical velocity network, and exact-inversion DPO training to achieve topology-aware and expressive control. The proposed framework enables a common PASS platform to flexibly support service-dependent confidentiality requirements while balancing online efficiency and control capability.