"New Countermeasure Against Unwanted Wireless Surveillance"

Smart devices are intended to make our lives easier, but at the same time, they can serve as a conduit for passive eavesdropping. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy, the Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB), and the Cologne University of Applied Sciences have developed a novel system for protecting privacy in wireless communication to prevent possible surveillance of the movement profile within one's home. Their approach is based on the technology of Intelligent Reflective Surfaces (IRS). To counter the method known as "adversarial wireless sensing," the team investigated the use of IRS, a forward-looking technology for establishing intelligent wireless environments. With this technology, many reflective elements are distributed over a surface, and their reflective behavior can be individually and electronically adjusted. This allows the elements to manipulate the incident radio waves dynamically. IRS can be configured to reflect signals in a specific direction. The researchers are the first to propose IRS as a practical countermeasure against passive wireless eavesdropping attacks. Their system called "IRShield" uses a specially designed algorithm that creates a random IRS configuration, thus disguising the wireless channels so that attackers can no longer read information about movements in the room from the signal. IRShield is designed to be a standalone privacy-friendly extension for plug-and-play integration into existing wireless infrastructures. This article continues to discuss the capabilities and testing of the IRShield system. 

RUB reports "New Countermeasure Against Unwanted Wireless Surveillance"