MALRIS: Malicious Hardware in RIS-Assisted Wireless Communications

TL;DR

This paper introduces the concept of malicious reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (MALRIS) that pose hardware security threats in RIS-assisted wireless systems, demonstrating how limited hardware compromises can significantly impair system performance and security.

Contribution

It identifies and models practical hardware-level threats in RIS, such as tampering and malicious firmware, and evaluates their impact through simulations, highlighting a new security concern in RIS deployment.

Findings

Hardware compromises can degrade system performance significantly.

Passive malicious RIS can affect secrecy and throughput.

Even limited hardware control causes notable security risks.

Abstract

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) enhance wireless communication by dynamically shaping the propagation environment, but their integration introduces hardware-level security risks. This paper presents the concept of Malicious RIS (MALRIS), where compromised components behave adversarially, even under passive operation. The focus of this work is on practical threats such as manufacturing time tampering, malicious firmware, and partial element control. Two representative attacks, power-splitting and element-splitting, are modeled to assess their impact. Simulations in a RIS-assisted system reveal that even a limited hardware compromise can significantly degrade performance metrics such as bit error rate, throughput, and secrecy metrics. By exposing this overlooked threat surface, this work aims to promote awareness and support secure, trustworthy RIS deployment in future wireless networks.