Secure Multicast Communications with Pinching-Antenna Systems (PASS)

This article investigates secure multicast communications in pinching-antenna systems (PASS), where pinching beamforming is enabled by adaptively adjusting pinching antenna (PAs) positions along waveguides to improve multicast security. Specifically, a PASS-based secure multicast framework is proposed, in which joint optimization of transmit and pinching beamforming is conducted to maximize the secrecy multicast rate. i) For the single-group multicast scenario, an alternating optimization (AO) framework is employed, where the pinching beamformer is updated via an element-wise sequential optimization method. The transmit beamformer is designed via a semidefinite relaxation (SDR) formulation for an upper-bound solution, while a Dinkelbach-alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) offers a low-complexity alternative. ii) For the multi-group multicast scenario, transmit and pinching beamformers are alternately optimized under a majorization-minimization (MM) framework. The transmit beamformer is obtained via SDR or an efficient second-order cone programming (SOCP) method, while the pinching beamformer is updated through MM-based element-wise sequential update strategy. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate that: (i) PASS consistently outperform conventional fixed-location antenna architectures in terms of secrecy performance across various configurations; and (ii) the performance advantage of PASS over fixed-location architectures becomes more significant with increased service region, larger antenna arrays, and higher user and eavesdropper densities.