Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Aided Radar Spoofing

TL;DR

This paper introduces an IRS-assisted radar spoofing method that shields a target from detection while misleading the radar with deceptive signals, offering a hardware-efficient alternative to traditional jamming.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel IRS-based radar spoofing strategy with optimized reflection design, providing a more efficient and less detectable countermeasure in electronic warfare.

Findings

The IRS-aided spoofing significantly reduces target detectability.

The optimization approach effectively enhances deceptive AoA signals.

Simulation confirms improved spoofing performance over benchmarks.

Abstract

Electronic countermeasure (ECM) technology plays a critical role in modern electronic warfare, which can interfere with enemy radar detection systems by noise or deceptive signals. However, the conventional active jamming strategy incurs additional hardware and power costs and has the potential threat of exposing the target itself. To tackle the above challenges, we propose a new intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided radar spoofing strategy in this letter, where IRS is deployed on the surface of a target to help eliminate the signals reflected towards the hostile radar to shield the target, while simultaneously redirecting its reflected signal towards a surrounding clutter to generate deceptive angle-of-arrival (AoA) sensing information for the radar. We optimize the IRS's reflection to maximize the received signal power at the radar from the direction of the selected clutter subject to the constraint that its received power from the direction of the target is lower than a given detection threshold. We first solve this non-convex optimization problem using the semidefinite relaxation (SDR) method and further propose a lower-complexity solution for real-time implementation. Simulation results validate the efficacy of our proposed IRS-aided spoofing system as compared to various benchmark schemes.