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IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference

Analysis of Pilot Contamination on the Security Performance of Artificial Noise in MIMO Systems

Shengbin Lin, Kaizhi Huang, Wenyu Luo, Yi Feng Zou

Published May 1, 2015• 7 citations
Publisher

Abstract

This paper considers a MIMO communication system that includes a transmitter, a legitimate receiver and an eavesdropper. In such a scenario, the eavesdropper has the knowledge of the pilot and utilizes pilot contamination to reduce the secrecy rate. Firstly, we analyze the effects of malicious pilot contamination on channel estimation. The more the pilot contamination power is, the more the eavesdropping performance enhances, by deducing the secrecy rate and its asymptotic expression in the data transmission phase. Besides, the optimal power allocation scheme for a full-duplex eavesdropper to simultaneously transmit pilot contamination and noise jamming is further studied. Simulation results show that the average secrecy rate with pilot contamination is 0.899bits/s/Hz less than that with noise jamming when the jamming power is 10 mW.

DOI
10.1109/vtcspring.2015.7145701

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arXiv:1902.08532•IEEE Transactions on Communications•Mar 27, 2019•31 citations
This paper considers a MIMO communication system that includes a transmitter, a legitimate receiver and an eavesdropper. In such a scenario, the eavesdropper has the knowledge of the pilot and utilizes pilot contamination to reduce the secrecy rate. Firstly, we analyze the effects of malicious pilot contamination on channel estimation. The more the pilot contamination power is, the more the eavesdropping performance enhances, by deducing the secrecy rate and its asymptotic expression in the data transmission phase. Besides, the optimal power allocation scheme for a full-duplex eavesdropper to simultaneously transmit pilot contamination and noise jamming is further studied. Simulation results show that the average secrecy rate with pilot contamination is 0.899bits/s/Hz less than that with noise jamming when the jamming power is 10 mW.
This paper proposes a secure transmission scheme based on the twice channel estimation in a three- node MIMO system according to the malicious pilot contamination. Firstly, the pilot transmission length is divided into two segments during the reverse training stage and the legitimate receiver allocates all the power to one arbitrary segment for transmitting the pilot. Then, the transmitter obtains the approximate estimation of the eavesdropping channel and an erroneous CSI of the main channel based on the twice channel estimation. After eliminating the eavesdropping channel from the erroneous CSI, the transmitter transmits both the signal and the artificial noise based on the modified CSI to ensure the transmission. Finally, the simulation results show that the proposed scheme significantly improves the security performance.
Owing to the openness of wireless channels, ensuring the security of communication for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems faces severe challenges. For the massive MIMO system in the presence of a full-duplex (FD) multi-antenna eavesdropper, a dual artificial-noise (AN) injection scheme is proposed to enhance communication security in this paper. Specifically, AN is superimposed onto the transmitted pilot signals to interfere with the eavesdropper from estimating the legitimate user channel in pilot training phases. In the phase of data transmission, the AN generated in the null space of the legitimate user is introduced to prevent the eavesdropper from receiving the confidential messages. Meanwhile, an iterative optimization algorithm is presented to obtain the optimal power allocation between the information-bearing signals and the AN for the potential countermeasures taken by the eavesdropper. Numerical results are presented to validate the superior performance of the proposed scheme in security ensurance compared to the conventional ones with AN injection schemes.
In this paper, we investigate the performance of artificial noise assisted secure communication in the presence of a full-duplex active eavesdropper who can simultaneously perform eavesdropping and jamming. An approximate closed-form expression for the secrecy rate is derived. With this result, we obtain a new result for the optimal power allocation factor maximizing the secrecy rate, and analyze the impact of self-interference coefficient and jamming power on it. We further consider a more practical scenario where the legitimate user aims to maintain a given target data rate and uses all remaining power for artificial noise (AN) to interfere with the eavesdropper. While the eavesdropper tries to compel the transmitter to reduce the AN by sending jamming signals to the legitimate receiver. To solve this conflict, we introduce a power cost parameter to describe the impact of jamming on the eavesdropper itself and then formulate a game-theoretic framework. We also derive the closed-form equilibrium solutions for both sides. These results show the optimal jamming strategy of the eavesdropper and provide insights into the low bound secrecy performance. Finally, simulation results are provided to verify our analytical results.
In this paper, the achievable secrecy rate of a relay-assisted massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) downlink is investigated in the presence of a multi-antenna active/passive eavesdropper. The excess degrees-of-freedom offered by a massive MIMO base-station (BS) are exploited for sending artificial noise (AN) via random and null-space precoders. An active eavesdropper contaminates the uplink channel estimates by sending pilot sequences identical to those of the legitimate users/relay. This active pilot contamination makes the massive MIMO BS implicitly beamform the confidential signals toward the active eavesdropper during two-hop downlink transmissions. The achievable secrecy rates are derived by taking the detrimental effects of actively contaminated channel state information with estimation errors and spatially correlated fading at the multiple-antenna terminals into account. The secrecy rate loss incurred by active pilot attacks over passive eavesdropping is investigated, and the secrecy rate gap between random and null-space-based AN is compared. A novel transmit power control policy is designed to efficiently allocate transmit power at the BS/relay for payload data and AN sequences for maximizing the achievable secrecy rate. Our results reveal that active pilot contamination attacks significantly degrade the achievable secrecy rate in dual-hop transmissions, and the corresponding detrimental effects cannot be asymptotically mitigated in the infinite BS antenna regime.
In this paper, a secure communication model for cognitive multi-user massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with underlay spectrum sharing is investigated. A secondary (cognitive) multi-user massive MIMO system is operated by using underlay spectrum sharing within a primary (licensed) multi-user massive MIMO system. A passive multi-antenna eavesdropper is assumed to be eavesdropping upon either the primary or secondary confidential transmissions. To this end, a physical layer security strategy is provisioned for the primary and secondary transmissions via artificial noise (AN) generation at the primary base-station (PBS) and zero-forcing precoders. Specifically, the precoders are constructed by using the channel estimates with pilot contamination. In order to degrade the interception of confidential transmissions at the eavesdropper, the AN sequences are transmitted at the PBS by exploiting the excess degrees-of-freedom offered by its massive antenna array and by using random AN shaping matrices. The channel estimates at the PBS and secondary base-station (SBS) are obtained by using non-orthogonal pilot sequences transmitted by the primary user nodes (PUs) and secondary user nodes (SUs), respectively. Hence, these channel estimates are affected by intra-cell pilot contamination. In this context, the detrimental effects of intra-cell pilot contamination and channel estimation errors for physical layer secure communication are investigated. For this system set-up, the average and asymptotic achievable secrecy rate expressions are derived in closed-form. Specifically, these performance metrics are studied for imperfect channel state information (CSI) and for perfect CSI, and thereby, the secrecy rate degradation due to inaccurate channel knowledge and intra-cell pilot contamination is quantified. Our analysis reveals that a physical layer secure communication can be provisioned for both primary and secondary massive MIMO systems even with the channel estimation errors and pilot contamination.
In this paper, we study the design of secure communication for time-division duplex multi-cell multi-user massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems with active eavesdropping. We assume that the eavesdropper actively attacks the uplink pilot transmission and the uplink data transmission before eavesdropping the downlink data transmission of the users. We exploit both the received pilot's and the received data signals for uplink channel estimation. We show analytically that when both the number of transmit antennas and the length of the data vector tend to infinity, the signals of the desired user and the eavesdropper lie in different eigenspaces of the received signal matrix at the base station, provided their signal powers are different. This finding reveals that decreasing (instead of increasing) the desired user's signal power might be an effective approach to combat a strong active attack from an eavesdropper. Inspired by this observation, we propose a data-aided secure downlink transmission scheme and derive an asymptotic achievable secrecy sum-rate expression for the proposed design. For the special case of a single-cell single-user system with independent and identically distributed fading, the obtained expression reveals that the secrecy rate scales logarithmically with the number of transmit antennas. This is the same scaling law as for the achievable rate of a single-user massive MIMO system in the absence of eavesdroppers. The numerical results indicate that the proposed scheme achieves significant secrecy rate gains compared with alternative approaches based on matched filter precoding with artificial noise generation and null space transmission.