  Intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) have several prominent advantages,
including improving the level of wireless communications security and privacy.
In this work, we focus on this aspect and envision a strategy to counteract the
presence of passive eavesdroppers overhearing transmissions from a base station
towards legitimate users. Unlike most of the existing works addressing passive
eavesdropping, the strategy we consider has low complexity and is suitable for
scenarios where nodes are equipped with a limited number of antennas. Through
our performance evaluation, we highlight the trade-off between the legitimate
users' data rate and secrecy rate, and how the system parameters affect such a
trade-off.
