IRShield: A Countermeasure Against Adversarial Physical-Layer Wireless Sensing

Wireless radio channels are known to contain information about the surrounding propagation environment, which can be extracted using established wireless sensing methods. Thus, today's ubiquitous wireless devices are attractive targets for passive eavesdroppers to launch reconnaissance attacks....

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2022-04
Main Authors: Staat, Paul, Mulzer, Simon, Roth, Stefan, Moonsamy, Veelasha, Heinrichs, Markus, Kronberger, Rainer, Aydin Sezgin, Paar, Christof
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Algorithms
Channels
Configuration management
Eavesdropping
Human motion
Indoor environments
Motion perception
Remote monitoring
Statistical methods
Wireless networks
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Summary:Wireless radio channels are known to contain information about the surrounding propagation environment, which can be extracted using established wireless sensing methods. Thus, today's ubiquitous wireless devices are attractive targets for passive eavesdroppers to launch reconnaissance attacks. In particular, by overhearing standard communication signals, eavesdroppers obtain estimations of wireless channels which can give away sensitive information about indoor environments. For instance, by applying simple statistical methods, adversaries can infer human motion from wireless channel observations, allowing to remotely monitor premises of victims. In this work, building on the advent of intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs), we propose IRShield as a novel countermeasure against adversarial wireless sensing. IRShield is designed as a plug-and-play privacy-preserving extension to existing wireless networks. At the core of IRShield, we design an IRS configuration algorithm to obfuscate wireless channels. We validate the effectiveness with extensive experimental evaluations. In a state-of-the-art human motion detection attack using off-the-shelf Wi-Fi devices, IRShield lowered detection rates to 5% or less.
ISSN:2331-8422