Physical Layer Security over Fluid Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-assisted Communication Systems

Abstract: This letter investigates the secrecy performance of wireless communication systems assisted by a fluid reconfigurable intelligent surface (FRIS). Unlike conventional reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) with fixed geometries, FRISs dynamically select a subset of reflective elements based on real-time channel conditions, offering enhanced spatial diversity and adaptability. Using this foundation, we model a secure downlink scenario where a base station communicates with a legitimate user in the presence of an eavesdropper, and the propagation is assisted by a FRIS with a limited number of elements set to the ON state. We analyze the system's secrecy performance under spatial correlation by deriving analytical lower and upper bounds for the secrecy outage probability (SOP) and average secrecy capacity (ASC), respectively. Our results demonstrate that FRIS effectively enables secure communication under spatial correlation. Even with partial activation, FRIS significantly outperforms conventional RISs in enhancing secrecy performance under varying deployment densities and element correlations.