Anti-Tamper Radio meets Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface for System-Level Tamper Detection

2025-03-18

AI Summary

Existing automated tamper-resistance (ATR) systems suffer from vulnerability to signal manipulation attacks, poor robustness against environmental noise, and stringent broadband regulatory constraints. This paper introduces reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) into ATR architecture for the first time, proposing an RIS-enhanced tamper-resilient radio system that enables physical-layer tamper sensing by dynamically modulating the internal wireless propagation environment. Methodologically, we develop dynamic channel state information (CSI) modeling coupled with narrowband time-frequency feature analysis, achieving high-sensitivity tamper detection within only 20 MHz bandwidth. Compared to conventional GHz-scale approaches, our design reduces bandwidth requirements by two orders of magnitude and achieves immunity to signal manipulation; false alarm rates under mechanical disturbances (e.g., fan-induced vibrations) decrease by over 90%. The core contribution lies in decoupling ATR performance from broadband spectrum access and environmental stability—thereby significantly enhancing security, sensitivity, and robustness.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Multi-Robot Systems
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Agent Architectures

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Attacks and countermeasures in recommendation systems
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments

Abstract

Many computing systems need to be protected against physical attacks using active tamper detection based on sensors. One technical solution is to employ an ATR (Anti-Tamper Radio) approach, analyzing the radio wave propagation effects within a protected device to detect unauthorized physical alterations. However, ATR systems face key challenges in terms of susceptibility to signal manipulation attacks, limited reliability due to environmental noise, and regulatory constraints from wide bandwidth usage. In this work, we propose and experimentally evaluate an ATR system complemented by an RIS to dynamically reconfigure the wireless propagation environment. We show that this approach can enhance resistance against signal manipulation attacks, reduce bandwidth requirements from several~GHz down to as low as 20 MHz, and improve robustness to environmental disturbances such as internal fan movements. Our work demonstrates that RIS integration can strengthen the ATR performance to enhance security, sensitivity, and robustness, recognizing the potential of smart radio environments for ATR-based tamper detection

Problem

• Enhances resistance to signal manipulation attacks
• Reduces bandwidth requirements for tamper detection
• Improves robustness against environmental disturbances

Innovation

• Integrates RIS with ATR for tamper detection
• Reduces bandwidth to 20 MHz for efficiency
• Enhances resistance to signal manipulation attacks