Wireless Side-Lobe Eavesdropping Attacks Yanzi Zhu, Ying Ju§†, Bolun Wang, Jenna Cryan‡, Ben Y. Zhao‡, Haitao Zheng‡ University of California, Santa Barbara §Xi’an Jiaotong University †State Radio Monitoring Center ‡University of Chicago {yanzi, bolunwang}@cs.ucsb.edu,
[email protected], {jennacryan, ravenben, htzheng}@cs.uchicago.edu ABSTRACT cation. Many such applications have already been deployed. Facebook has deployed a mesh network using 60GHz com- Millimeter-wave wireless networks offer high throughput and munications in downtown San Jose [7]. Google is consider- can (ideally) prevent eavesdropping attacks using narrow, ing replacing wired fiber with mmWave to reduce cost [5]. directional beams. Unfortunately, imperfections in physi- Academics have proposed picocell networks using mmWave cal hardware mean today’s antenna arrays all exhibit side signals towards next 5G network [29, 32, 42]. lobes, signals that carry the same sensitive data as the main With a growing number of deployed networks and ap- lobe. Our work presents results of the first experimental plications, understanding physical properties of mmWave is study of the security properties of mmWave transmissions critical. One under-studied aspect of directional transmis- against side-lobe eavesdropping attacks. We show that these sions is the artifact of array side lobes. Fig. 1 shows an ex- attacks on mmWave links are highly effective in both indoor ample of the series of side lobes pointing in different direc- and outdoor settings, and they cannot be eliminated by im- tions. Side lobes are results of imperfect signal cancellation proved hardware or currently proposed defenses. among antenna elements. While weaker than the main lobe, 1.