Eavesdroppers can hack 6G frequency with DIY metasurface

Science Daily  May 16, 2022
Metasurfaces enable controllable manipulation of electromagnetic waves and have been shown to improve wireless communications in many diverse ways. A team of researchers in the US (Rice University, Brown University) defined and experimentally demonstrated a “MetaSurface-in-the-Middle” (MSITM) attack. In this attack, the adversary Eve placed a metasurface in the path of a directive transmission between Alice and Bob and targeted to re-direct a portion of the signal towards herself, without being detected. They showed how to design a metasurface that induces abrupt phase changes at the interface of the metasurface to controllably diffract directional links and establish eavesdropping links and explored the theoretical foundations of the MSITM attack and demonstrated how the metasurface could be prototyped in under 5 min at the cost of several cents. They demonstrated the attack in a THz time-domain system and performed a set of over-the-air experiments. According to the researchers their results indicated that the MSITM attack yielded an acute vulnerability that can significantly reduce empirical secrecy capacity while leaving a minimal energy footprint, making the attack challenging to detect…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE