Eavesdropping with intelligent reflective surfaces: Near-optimal configuration cycling

Abstract

Intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) have several prominent advantages, including improving the level of wireless communication security and privacy. In this work, we focus on the latter aspect and introduce a strategy to counteract the presence of passive eavesdroppers overhearing transmissions from a base station towards legitimate users that are facilitated by the presence of IRSs. Specifically, we envision a transmission scheme that cycles across a number of IRS-to-user assignments, and we select them in a near-optimal fashion, thus guaranteeing both a high data rate and a good secrecy rate. Unlike most of the existing works addressing passive eavesdropping, the strategy we envision has low complexity and is suitable for scenarios where nodes are equipped with a limited number of antennas. Through our performance evaluation, we highlight the trade-off between the legitimate users’ data rate and secrecy rate, and how the system parameters affect such a trade-off.