5 research outputs found
Disco Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces: Active Channel Aging for Fully-Passive Jamming Attacks
Due to the open communications environment in wireless channels, wireless
networks are vulnerable to jamming attacks. However, existing approaches for
jamming rely on knowledge of the legitimate users' (LUs') channels, extra
jamming power, or both. To raise concerns about the potential threats posed by
illegitimate intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs), we propose an alternative
method to launch jamming attacks on LUs without either LU channel state
information (CSI) or jamming power. The proposed approach employs an
adversarial IRS with random phase shifts, referred to as a "disco" IRS (DIRS),
that acts like a "disco ball" to actively age the LUs' channels. Such active
channel aging (ACA) interference can be used to launch jamming attacks on
multi-user multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) systems. The proposed
DIRS-based fully-passive jammer (FPJ) can jam LUs with no additional jamming
power or knowledge of the LU CSI, and it can not be mitigated by classical
anti-jamming approaches. A theoretical analysis of the proposed DIRS-based FPJ
that provides an evaluation of the DIRS-based jamming attacks is derived. Based
on this detailed theoretical analysis, some unique properties of the proposed
DIRS-based FPJ can be obtained. Furthermore, a design example of the proposed
DIRS-based FPJ based on one-bit quantization of the IRS phases is demonstrated
to be sufficient for implementing the jamming attack. In addition, numerical
results are provided to show the effectiveness of the derived theoretical
analysis and the jamming impact of the proposed DIRS-based FPJ
A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances and Future Trends
This paper examines the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the
inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense
mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the
security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity,
confidentiality, integrity and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive
overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in
view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats
are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing
security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless
network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term
evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state-of-the-art in
physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open
communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer.
We also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their
counter-measures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive
jammer, adaptive jammer and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the
integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and
cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some
technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are
summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.Comment: 36 pages. Accepted to Appear in Proceedings of the IEEE, 201