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arXiv:1801.04104 · IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications

Multiple Antennas Secure Transmission Under Pilot Spoofing and Jamming Attack

Hui‐Ming Wang, Ke-Wen Huang, Theodoros A. Tsiftsis

Published Apr 1, 2018• 52 citations
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Abstract

Transmitter-side channel state information of the legitimate destination plays a critical role in physical layer secure transmissions. However, channel training procedure is vulnerable to the pilot spoofing attack (PSA) or pilot jamming attack (PJA) by an active eavesdropper (Eve), which inevitably results in severe private information leakage. In this paper, we propose a random channel training (RCT)-based secure downlink transmission framework for a time division duplex multiple antennas base station. In the proposed RCT scheme, multiple orthogonal pilot sequences (PSs) are simultaneously allocated to the legitimate user (LU), and the LU randomly selects one PS from the assigned PS set to transmit. Under either the PSA or PJA, we provide the detailed steps for the BS to identify the PS transmitted by the LU, and to simultaneously estimate channels of the LU and Eve. The probability that the BS makes an incorrect decision on the PS of the LU is analytically investigated. Finally, closed-form secure beamforming vectors are designed and optimized to enhance the secrecy rates during the downlink transmissions. Numerical results show that the secrecy performance is greatly improved compared to the conventional channel training scheme wherein only one PS is assigned to the LU.

DOI
10.1109/jsac.2018.2825148

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Transmitter-side channel state information of the legitimate destination plays a critical role in physical layer secure transmissions. However, channel training procedure is vulnerable to the pilot spoofing attack (PSA) or pilot jamming attack (PJA) by an active eavesdropper (Eve), which inevitably results in severe private information leakage. In this paper, we propose a random channel training (RCT)-based secure downlink transmission framework for a time division duplex multiple antennas base station. In the proposed RCT scheme, multiple orthogonal pilot sequences (PSs) are simultaneously allocated to the legitimate user (LU), and the LU randomly selects one PS from the assigned PS set to transmit. Under either the PSA or PJA, we provide the detailed steps for the BS to identify the PS transmitted by the LU, and to simultaneously estimate channels of the LU and Eve. The probability that the BS makes an incorrect decision on the PS of the LU is analytically investigated. Finally, closed-form secure beamforming vectors are designed and optimized to enhance the secrecy rates during the downlink transmissions. Numerical results show that the secrecy performance is greatly improved compared to the conventional channel training scheme wherein only one PS is assigned to the LU.
In a multi-antenna time-division duplex (TDD) communication system, due to channel reciprocity, the downlink channel state information can be obtained by conducting uplink training. In a wire-tap channel, an active eavesdropper can perform active eavesdropping by pilot spoofing attack. In such an attack, the eavesdropper, during the uplink training phase, transmits the identical pilot sequence as that of the legitimate receiver to the transmitter. As a result, the estimated channel by the transmitter is a weighted sum of the legitimate channel and the eavesdropping channel. Motivated by the seriousness of pilot spoofing attack, in this paper, we propose a two-stage uplink training method for pilot spoofing attack detection and secure transmission. Using the new training method, the legitimate channel and the eavesdropping channel can be correctly estimated separately. Then we propose a pilot spoofing attack detector followed by a beamforming scheme for secure data transmission. Simulation results have shown that our proposed method achieves higher detection probability, and larger secrecy rate than previously proposed anti-pilot spoofing methods.
In this paper, we investigate the design of a pilot spoofing attack (PSA) carried out by multiple single-antenna eavesdroppers (Eves) in a downlink time-division duplex system, where a multiple antenna base station (BS) transmits confidential information to a single-antenna legitimate user. During the uplink channel training phase, multiple Eves collaboratively impair the channel acquisition of the legitimate link, aimed at maximizing the wiretapping signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in the subsequent downlink data transmission phase. Two different scenarios are investigated: 1) the BS is unaware of the PSA and 2) the BS attempts to detect the presence of the PSA. For both scenarios, we formulate wiretapping SNR maximization problems. For the second scenario, we also investigate the probability of successful detection and constrain it to remain below a pre-designed threshold. The two resulting optimization problems can be unified into a more general non-convex optimization problem, and we propose an efficient algorithm based on the minorization-maximization (MM) method and the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to solve it. The proposed MM-ADMM algorithm is shown to converge to a stationary point of the general problem. In addition, we propose a semi-definite relaxation (SDR) method as a benchmark to evaluate the efficiency of the MM-ADMM algorithm. Numerical results show that the MM-ADMM algorithm achieves near-optimal performance and is computationally more efficient than the SDR-based method.
In this paper, we investigate secure and reliable transmission strategies for multi-cell multi-user massive multiple-input multiple-output systems with a multi-antenna active eavesdropper. We consider a time-division duplex system where uplink training is required and an active eavesdropper can attack the training phase to cause pilot contamination at the transmitter. This forces the precoder used in the subsequent downlink transmission phase to implicitly beamform toward the eavesdropper, thus increasing its received signal power. Assuming matched filter precoding and artificial noise (AN) generation at the transmitter, we derive an asymptotic achievable secrecy rate when the number of transmit antennas approaches infinity. For the case of a single-antenna active eavesdropper, we obtain a closed-form expression for the optimal power allocation policy for the transmit signal and the AN, and find the minimum transmit power required to ensure reliable secure communication. Furthermore, we show that the transmit antenna correlation diversity of the intended users and the eavesdropper can be exploited in order to improve the secrecy rate. In fact, under certain orthogonality conditions of the channel covariance matrices, the secrecy rate loss introduced by the eavesdropper can be completely mitigated.
Proactive eavesdropping is an effective method for government to monitor suspicious users who are deemed to misuse communication systems for illegal activities. In this paper, considering that a legitimate full-duplex (FD) eavesdropper tries to monitor a dubious multi-antenna system, we propose a covert pilot spoofing attack (PSA) scheme to enhance the legitimate eavesdropping performance by taking the channel training phase into consideration. For the proposed covert PSA scheme, the total error detection probability and optimal detection threshold of suspicious source are derived as the worst case for the considered monitoring system. Given the optimal detection threshold, the closed-form expressions of effective eavesdropping rate are also derived based on the results of detection at suspicious source. Furthermore, an optimal power allocation algorithm to maximize the effective eavesdropping rate is proposed under the covert PSA and transmission power constraints. Simulation results illustrate that the adversary's uncertain about channel state information (CSI) before channel estimation process, can be exploited by legitimate eavesdropper to cover the PSA without being detected. Therefore, the proposed covert PSA scheme can achieve a better performance with respect to effective eavesdropping rate and effectively combat with a suspicious multi-antenna system.
The pilot spoofing attack is one kind of active eavesdropping activities conducted by a malicious user during the channel training phase. By transmitting the identical pilot (training) signals as those of the legal users, such an attack is able to manipulate the channel estimation outcome, which may result in a larger channel rate for the adversary but a smaller channel rate for the legitimate receiver. With the intention of detecting the pilot spoofing attack and minimizing its damages, we design a two-way training-based scheme. The effective detector exploits the intrusive component created by the adversary, followed by a secure beamforming-assisted data transmission. In addition to the solid detection performance, this scheme is also capable of obtaining the estimations of both legitimate and illegitimate channels, which allows the users to achieve secure communication in the presence of pilot spoofing attack. The detection probability is evaluated based on the derived test threshold at a given requirement on the probability of false alarming. The achievable secrecy rate is utilized to measure the security level of the data transmission. Our analysis shows that even without any pre-assumed knowledge of eavesdropper, the proposed scheme is still able to achieve the maximal secrecy rate in certain cases. Numerical results are provided to show that our scheme could achieve a high detection probability as well as secure transmission.
The pilot spoofing attack is one kind of active eavesdropping activities conducted by an adversary during the channel training phase, which manipulates the channel estimation outcome and brings new challenges to physical layer secure transmission. In this paper, we propose a novel two-way training-based scheme to detect the pilot spoofing attack where the reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is turned off in the uplink training phase and turned on in the downlink training phase, respectively. Furthermore, based on the estimated and statistical channel state information of the legitimate and eavesdropping links, we propose the secrecy outage probability constrained robust secure beamforming design with the assistance of RIS. The active beamforming and RIS passive beamforming are jointly optimized based on the alternating optimization algorithm to maximize the achievable secrecy rate of the legitimate user. Finally, simulation results show that our proposed RIS-aided robust secure beamforming design is capable of efficiently improving the achievable secrecy rate compared with different baseline schemes.