Securing Wireless Networks Against Illegal Intelligent Reflecting Surface (IIRS) Jamming Attacks

Illegal intelligent reflecting surfaces (I-IRSs), i.e., the illegal deployment and utilization of IRSs, impose serious harmful impacts on wireless networks. The existing I-IRS-based illegal jammer (IJ) requires channel state information (CSI) or extra power or both, and therefore, the I-IRS-based IJ seems to be difficult to implement in practical wireless networks. Due to continued sharing of resources, wireless networks often come under security attacks, most common of which are eavesdropping attacks. In the case of eavesdropping attacks, deliberately designed random eavesdropping data is added to the channel. These eavesdropping along with noise result in packet losses and low throughput, degrading the overall performance of the cognitive network. In this work, a security aware jamming and eavesdropping rejection mechanism is proposed which detects suspicious signals in the channel frequency response and employs discrete equalization to recover transmitted data. The proposed approach uses a chaos based FFH protocol for possible adversarial eavesdropping attacks. The error rate and average sum rate show that the proposed system outperforms the exiting systems in terms of the performance metrics.