Eavesdropping with Intelligent Reflective Surfaces: Threats and Defense Strategies

TL;DR

This paper explores how intelligent reflecting surfaces can be used to enhance wireless security by defending against passive eavesdroppers, proposing a low-complexity strategy suitable for systems with limited antennas.

Contribution

It introduces a novel low-complexity defense strategy leveraging IRSs to counteract passive eavesdropping in systems with few antennas, addressing a gap in existing research.

Findings

Trade-off between data rate and secrecy rate analyzed

System parameters influence security performance

Strategy effective for low-antenna scenarios

Abstract

Intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) have several prominent advantages, including improving the level of wireless communications security and privacy. In this work, we focus on this aspect and envision a strategy to counteract the presence of passive eavesdroppers overhearing transmissions from a base station towards legitimate users. Unlike most of the existing works addressing passive eavesdropping, the strategy we consider has low complexity and is suitable for scenarios where nodes are equipped with a limited number of antennas. Through our performance evaluation, we highlight the trade-off between the legitimate users' data rate and secrecy rate, and how the system parameters affect such a trade-off.