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.