Individualized Cybersecurity Research Mentoring (iMentor) Workshop 2023

Title: IRShield: A Countermeasure Against Adversarial Physical-Layer Wireless Sensing

Abstract: Wireless radio channels are known to contain sensitive information about the surrounding propagation environment, which can be extracted using well-established wireless sensing methods. Thus, today's ubiquitous wireless devices (e.g., IoT) are attractive targets for passive eavesdroppers to launch reconnaissance attacks. In particular, by overhearing standard communication signals, eavesdroppers can obtain estimations of wireless channels, which then give away sensitive information about indoor environments. For instance, adversaries can infer human motion from wireless channel observations, therefore, allowing them to remotely monitor premises of victims.

In this talk, I will present IRShield, a novel countermeasure leveraging the technology of intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS). IRShield is designed as a plug-and-play, privacy-preserving extension to existing wireless networks and is capable of obfuscating wireless channels.

Bio: Veelasha Moonsamy is a tenured research faculty at the Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security and a Principle Investigator within the Excellence Cluster CASA at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor at Radboud University, in The Netherlands, where she also spent some years working as a postdoctoral researcher. She obtained her Ph.D. from Deakin University in Melbourne (Australia). Her research interests revolve around security and privacy of mobile/IoT devices, in particular side- and covert-channel attacks, malware detection, and mitigation of information leaks at application and hardware level. Veelasha was awarded a Google Faculty Research award in 2020 and recently she served as Track Chair for Hardware, Side Channels, and Cyber-Physical Systems at ACM CCS 2023.