Secure Active and Passive Beamforming in IRS-Aided MIMO Systems

Abstract

In intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, the IRS can be utilized to suppress the information leakage towards malicious terminals. This can lead to significant secrecy gains. This work exploits these gains via a tractable <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">joint</i> design of downlink beamformers and IRS phase-shifts. In this respect, we consider a generic IRS-aided MIMO wiretap setting and invoke fractional programming and alternating optimization to iteratively find the beamformers and phase-shifts that maximize the achievable weighted secrecy sum-rate. Our design is comprised of two low-complexity algorithms. Performance of the proposed algorithms are numerically evaluated and compared to the benchmark. The results reveal that integrating IRSs into MIMO systems not only boosts the secrecy performance, but also improves the robustness against passive eavesdropping.