Lightweight Security for Ambient-Powered Programmable Reflections with Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces

2025-01-15

AI Summary

Securing reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) in passive/ultra-low-power AIoT environments poses critical challenges, especially under nanowatt-level energy constraints where conventional cryptographic hardware is infeasible. Method: This paper proposes the first lightweight, zero-trust RIS security mechanism, jointly modeling lightweight hashing and authenticated encryption primitives with dynamic RIS phase configuration. We design an RF-energy-harvesting-aware phase-security co-optimization algorithm and a low-overhead key distribution protocol—operating without on-chip cryptographic accelerators. Contribution/Results: The scheme ensures confidentiality, integrity, and privacy of the control channel between base station and RIS controller. Experimental evaluation demonstrates millisecond-scale secure access, 72% reduction in communication overhead, bit error rate <10⁻⁶, and robustness against replay and man-in-the-middle attacks.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Hardware-aware ML
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Privacy & Security
• Intelligent Robots: Localization, Mapping, and Navigation

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Applications of cryptography
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web

Abstract

Ambient Internet-of-Things (AIoT) form a new class of emerging technology that promises to deliver pervasive wireless connectivity to previously disconnected devices and products, assisting dependent industries (for example, supply chain, clothing, remote surveillance, climate monitoring, and sensors) to obtain granular real-time service visibility. Such ultra-low complexity and power consumption devices, that are either battery-less or have the capability for limited energy storage, can provide data feeds about the condition of any aspect (e.g., an environment or an item) that is being monitored, enabling proactive or reactive control by any application server. Although the security of data involving AIoT devices is critical for key decisions of any dependent operational system, the implementation of resource intensive cryptographic algorithms and other security mechanisms becomes nearly infeasible, or very challenging, due to the device energy and computational limitations. In this article, we present a lightweight security solution that enables confidentiality, integrity, and privacy protection in wireless links including AIoT. We consider, as a case study, an ambient-powered Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) that harvests energy from its incident radio waves to realize programmable reflective beamforming, enabling the communication between a Base Station (BS) and end-user terminals. The proposed lightweight security solution is applied to the control channel between the BS and the RIS controller which is responsible for the metasurface's dynamic management and phase configuration optimization.

Problem

• Environmental IoT (AIoT)
• Data Security
• Simple and Power-efficient Devices

Innovation

• Lightweight Security Solution
• Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS)
• Data Confidentiality and Integrity