Mirror Mirror on the Wall: Next-Generation Wireless Jamming Attacks Based on Software-Controlled Surfaces

The intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a promising new paradigm in wireless communications to meet the growing demand for high-speed connectivity in next-generation mobile networks. IRS, also known as software-controlled metasurfaces, consist of an array of adjustable radio wave reflectors, enabling smart radio environments, e.g., for enhancing the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and spatial diversity of wireless channels. Research on IRS to date has been largely focused on constructive applications. In this work, we show for the first time that the IRS provides a practical low-cost toolkit for attackers to easily perform complex signal manipulation attacks on the physical layer in real time. We introduce the environment reconfiguration attack (ERA) as a novel class of jamming attacks in wireless radio networks. Here, an adversary leverages an IRS to rapidly vary the electromagnetic propagation environment to disturb legitimate receivers. The IRS gives the adversary a key advantage over traditional jamming: It no longer has to actively emit a jamming signal itself while the jamming signal is correlated to the legitimate communication signal. We thoroughly investigate the ERA using the popular orthogonal frequency division multiplexing~(OFDM) modulation as an example. We show that the ERA allows to severely degrade the available data rates even in entire networks. We present insights to the attack through analytical analysis, simulations, as well as experiments. Our results highlight that the attack also works with reasonably small IRS sizes. Finally, we implement an attacker setup and demonstrate a practical ERA to slow down a Wi-Fi network.