Metasurface-in-the-Middle Attack
Zhambyl Shaikhanov, Fahid Hassan, Hichem Guerboukha, Daniel M. Mittleman, Edward W. Knightly
Abstract
Metasurfaces enable controllable manipulation of electromagnetic waves and have been shown to improve wireless communications in many diverse ways. In this paper, we define and experimentally demonstrate for the first time a "MetaSurface-in-the-Middle'' (MSITM) attack. In this attack, the adversary Eve places a metasurface in the path of a directive transmission between Alice and Bob and targets to re-direct a portion of the signal towards herself, without being detected. In particular, we show how Eve can design a metasurface that induces abrupt phase changes at the interface of the metasurface to controllably diffract directional links and establish furtive eavesdropping links. We explore the theoretical foundations of the MSITM attack and demonstrate that an effective metasurface can be prototyped in under 5 min at the cost of several cents. We experimentally demonstrate the attack in a THz time-domain system and perform a set of over-the-air experiments. Our results indicate that the MSITM attack yields an acute vulnerability that can significantly reduce empirical secrecy capacity while leaving a minimal energy footprint, making the attack challenging to detect.