MetaWave: Attacking mmWave Sensing with Meta-material-enhanced Tags

Abstract

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) sensing has been applied in many critical applications, serving millions of thousands of people around the world. However, it is vulnerable to attacks in the real world. These attacks are based on expensive and professional radio frequency (RF) modulator-based instruments and can be prevented by conventional practice (e.g., RF fingerprint). In this paper, we propose and design a novel passive mmWave attack, called MetaWave, with low-cost and easily obtainable meta-material tags for both vanish and ghost attack types. These meta-material tags are made of commercial offthe-shelf (COTS) materials with customized tag designs to attack various goals, which considerably low the attack bar on mmWave sensing. Specifically, we demonstrate that tags made of ordinal material (e.g., C-RAM LF) can be leveraged to precisely tamper the mmWave echo signal and spoof the range, angle, and speed sensing measurements. Besides, to optimize the attack, a general simulator-based MetaWave attack framework is proposed and designed to simulate the tag modulation effects on the mmWave signal with advanced tag and scene parameters. We evaluate, MetaWave, the meta-material tag attack in both simulation and real-world experiments (i.e., 20 different environments) with various attack settings. Experimental results demonstrate that MetaWave can achieve up to 97% Top-1 attack accuracy on range estimation, 96% on angle estimation, and 91% on speed estimation in actual practice, 10-100X cheaper than existing mmWave attack methods. We also evaluate the usability and robustness of MetaWave under different real-world scenarios. Moreover, we conduct in-depth analysis and discussion on countermeasures for MetaWave mmWave attacks to improve wireless sensing and cyber-infrastructure security.

MadRadar: A Black-Box Physical Layer Attack Framework on mmWave Automotive FMCW Radars

“…Additionally, [16] and [17] introduced passive attacks and early detect/late commit (ED/LC) attacks, respectively. While [16] introduced passive attacks on FMCW radars using physical patches placed in the environment, these attacks are limited as the attacks cannot dynamically change the spoofing location and each patch must be specifically designed for the specific attack goals, victim radar configuration, and environment.…”

“…Additionally, [16] and [17] introduced passive attacks and early detect/late commit (ED/LC) attacks, respectively. While [16] introduced passive attacks on FMCW radars using physical patches placed in the environment, these attacks are limited as the attacks cannot dynamically change the spoofing location and each patch must be specifically designed for the specific attack goals, victim radar configuration, and environment. The ED/LC attack [17] listens to and then retransmits a victim's signal to spoof an object's range, but the attack is only designed for chirp spread spectrum-based ranging and thus does not work against FMCW radars.…”