Malicious RIS Meets RSMA: Unveiling the Robustness of Rate Splitting to RIS-Induced Attacks

While the robustness of rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) to imperfect channel state information (CSI) is well-documented, its susceptibility to attacks launched with malicious reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) remains unexplored. This paper fills this gap by investigating three potential RIS-induced attacks against RSMA in a multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) network: random interference, aligned interference, and mitigation attack. The random interference attack employs random RIS coefficients to disrupt RSMA. The other two attacks are triggered by optimizing the RIS through weighted-sum strategies based on the projected gradient method. Simulation results reveal significant degradation caused by all the attacks under perfect CSI conditions. Remarkably, when imperfect CSI is considered, RSMA, owing to its flexible power allocation strategy designed to counter CSI-related interference, can be robust to the attacks even when the base station is blind to them. It is also shown that RSMA can significantly outperform conventional space-division multiple access (SDMA). Accepted in IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), Dec. 2024, Cape Town, South Africa