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Protego: securing wireless communication via programmable metasurface

Published:14 October 2022Publication History

ABSTRACT

Phased array beamforming has been extensively explored as a physical layer primitive to improve the secrecy capacity of wireless communication links. However, existing solutions are incompatible with low-profile IoT devices due to cost, power and form factor constraints. More importantly, they are vulnerable to eavesdroppers with a high-sensitivity receiver. This paper presents Protego, which offloads the security protection to a metasurface comprised of a large number of 1-bit programmable unit-cells (i.e., phase shifters). Protego builds on a novel observation that, due to phase quantization effect, not all the unit-cells contribute equally to beamforming. By judiciously flipping the phase shift of certain unit-cells, Protego can generate artificial phase noise to obfuscate the signals towards potential eavesdroppers, while preserving the signal integrity and beamforming gain towards the legitimate receiver. A hardware prototype along with extensive experiments has validated the feasibility and effectiveness of Protego.

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        MobiCom '22: Proceedings of the 28th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing And Networking
        October 2022
        932 pages
        ISBN:9781450391818
        DOI:10.1145/3495243

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        • Published: 14 October 2022

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