Mirror Mirror on the Wall: Wireless Environment Reconfiguration Attacks Based on Fast Software-Controlled Surfaces

07/04/2021
by   Paul Staat, et al.
0

The intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a promising new paradigm in wireless communications for meeting the growing connectivity demands in next-generation mobile networks. IRS, also known as software-controlled metasurfaces, consist of an array of adjustable radio wave reflectors, enabling smart radio environments, e.g., for enhancing the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and spatial diversity of wireless channels. Research on IRS to date has been largely focused on constructive applications. In this work, we demonstrate for the first time that the IRS provides a practical low-cost toolkit for attackers to easily perform complex signal manipulation attacks on the physical layer in real time. We introduce the environment reconfiguration attack (ERA) as a novel class of jamming attacks in wireless radio networks. Here, an adversary leverages the IRS to rapidly vary the electromagnetic propagation environment to disturb legitimate receivers. The IRS gives the adversary a key advantage over traditional jamming: It no longer has to actively emit jamming signals, instead the IRS reflects existing legitimate signals. In addition, the adversary doesn't need any knowledge about the legitimate channel. We thoroughly investigate the ERA in wireless systems based on the widely employed orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation. We present insights into the attack through analytical analysis, simulations, as well as experiments. Our results show that the ERA allows to severely degrade the available data rates even with reasonably small IRS sizes. Finally, we implement an attacker setup and demonstrate a practical ERA to slow down an entire Wi-Fi network.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 8

page 9

research
09/27/2020

Performance of Intelligent Reconfigurable Surface-Based Wireless Communications Using QAM Signaling

Intelligent reconfigurable surface (IRS) is being seen as a promising te...
research
12/17/2019

Towards Smart Radio Environment for Wireless Communications via Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces: A Comprehensive Survey

This paper presents a comprehensive literature review on applications an...
research
01/07/2020

IRS-based Wireless Jamming Attacks: When Jammers can Attack without Power

This paper introduces a new type of wireless jamming attack, called IRS ...
research
01/06/2022

Towards Industry 5.0: Intelligent Reflecting Surface (IRS) in Smart Manufacturing

Industry 5.0 envisions close cooperation between humans and machines tha...
research
12/03/2021

IRShield: A Countermeasure Against Adversarial Physical-Layer Wireless Sensing

Wireless radio channels are known to contain information about the surro...
research
01/23/2023

ESWORD: Implementation of Wireless Jamming Attacks in a Real-World Emulated Network

Wireless jamming attacks have plagued wireless communication systems and...
research
12/16/2021

Anti-Tamper Radio: System-Level Tamper Detection for Computing Systems

A whole range of attacks becomes possible when adversaries gain physical...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset