MetaFly: Wireless Backhaul Interception via Aerial Wavefront Manipulation

Wireless backhaul links, already ubiquitous and expanding further with 5G and beyond, are employed for many critical functions, such as financial trading on Wall Street. In this work, we demonstrate for the first time that such links are acutely vulnerable to a new class of aerial metasurface attacks. In particular, we show how an adversary Eve designs and employs MetaFly to covertly manipulate the electromagnetic wavefront of the signals and remotely eavesdrop on highly directional backhaul links. Exploring the foundation of the attack, we demonstrate Eve’s strategy for generating eavesdropping diffraction beams by inducing pre-defined phase profiles at the aerial metasurface interface. We also show how Eve’s flight navigation approach can dynamically shape radiation patterns based on drone mobility via a wavefront-tailored flight refinement principle. We prototype MetaFly and demonstrate Eve’s lightweight, low-cost, transmissive, and power-free aerial metasurface. We implement the attack and perform a suite of over-the-air experiments in both a large indoor atrium and outdoor rooftops in a large metropolitan area. The results reveal that armed with MetaFly, Eve can intercept backhaul transmissions with nearly zero bit error rate while maintaining minimal impact on legitimate communication.