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IEEE Transactions on Communications

Detection of Pilot Contamination Attack based on Uncoordinated Frequency Shifts

Weile Zhang, Hai Feng Lin, Ruonan Zhang

Published Jan 9, 2018• 38 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Pilot contamination attack is an important activity of active eavesdropping conducted by a malicious user during channel training phase. This attack is potentially harmful to the physical layer security. In this paper, motivated by the fact that frequency asynchronism could introduce divergence of the transmitted pilot signals between intended user and attacker, we propose a new uncoordinated frequency shift (UFS) scheme for detecting pilot contamination attack in multiple antenna system. During the reverse training phase of the UFS scheme, the legitimate user Bob deliberately introduces multiple random frequency shifts in the publicly known pilot sequence. Since eavesdropper Eve has no knowledge of these random frequency shifts, it is almost impossible for her to pretend exactly like Bob. This provides the opportunity to detect the presence of Eve. An attack detection algorithm is then developed based on source enumeration method. Both the asymptotic performance analysis and numerical results are provided to verify the proposed detection scheme. The proposed scheme is also enhanced based on noise power estimation to cope with attacks from a multi-antenna Eve. Furthermore, the proposed UFS scheme is extended by introducing general parameterized phase shifts. It is demonstrated that the proposed UFS scheme can achieve comparable detection performance as the existing superimposed random sequence based scheme, without sacrifice of legitimate channel estimation performance.

DOI
10.1109/tcomm.2018.2791535

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arXiv:1801.04104•IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications•Apr 1, 2018•52 citations
Pilot contamination attack is an important activity of active eavesdropping conducted by a malicious user during channel training phase. This attack is potentially harmful to the physical layer security. In this paper, motivated by the fact that frequency asynchronism could introduce divergence of the transmitted pilot signals between intended user and attacker, we propose a new uncoordinated frequency shift (UFS) scheme for detecting pilot contamination attack in multiple antenna system. During the reverse training phase of the UFS scheme, the legitimate user Bob deliberately introduces multiple random frequency shifts in the publicly known pilot sequence. Since eavesdropper Eve has no knowledge of these random frequency shifts, it is almost impossible for her to pretend exactly like Bob. This provides the opportunity to detect the presence of Eve. An attack detection algorithm is then developed based on source enumeration method. Both the asymptotic performance analysis and numerical results are provided to verify the proposed detection scheme. The proposed scheme is also enhanced based on noise power estimation to cope with attacks from a multi-antenna Eve. Furthermore, the proposed UFS scheme is extended by introducing general parameterized phase shifts. It is demonstrated that the proposed UFS scheme can achieve comparable detection performance as the existing superimposed random sequence based scheme, without sacrifice of legitimate channel estimation performance.
The pilot contamination attack is one kind of active eavesdropping activities conducted by a malicious user during the channel training phase. In the existing physical layer transmission against such attack, it is usually assumed that the transmitters may obtain prior knowledge to identify the legitimate users first, then design secure scheme based on the corrected main channel information. However, sometimes it is likely that the prior knowledge is not available, which makes it more difficult to design the transmitting scheme. Motivated by this, we propose a novel transmission against the pilot contamination attack. In our scheme, it is assumed that ideal prior knowledge of the main channel state information (CSI) is not available. Additionally, an extra assistant node is introduced to the well-known Wyner eavesdropping model. Both the uncorrected main CSI and the CSI at the assistant node are used to design the random scrambling scheme at the transmitter, which means there is no need to differentiate between eavesdroppers and legitimate users. Furthermore, we discuss the receiving performance of legitimate users cooperated with the assistant node. Numerical results shows that the legitimate users could achieve pleasant receiving performance while eavesdroppers could hardly obtain acceptable recovery of the original signal.
We present a secure transmission method for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signaling between legitimate nodes (Alice and Bob) communicating in time-division duplex (TDD) mode under an active attack. An active eavesdropper carries out pilot contamination attack in pilot phase by transmitting the pilot signal of the legitimate user and jamming attack in data phase. In the proposed method, Alice estimates the reciprocal channel between Alice and Bob by employing successive cancellation of the pilot contamination and interference from an active eavesdropper in pilot and data phases, respectively. We estimate reciprocal channels of legitimate users and eavesdropper. The precoder design at Alice from the estimated channels steers information towards Bob and artificial noise towards Eve in order to enhance the secrecy capacity of channel of the legitimate nodes. The simulation results show that the proposed method effectively estimates the channels of legitimate users and eavesdropper by removing the impact of contamination attack. Consequently, legitimate channel achieves higher secrecy capacity.
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.
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.
Existing studies on physical layer security often assume the availability of perfect channel state information (CSI) and overlook the importance of channel training needed for obtaining the CSI. In this letter, we discuss how an active eavesdropper can attack the training phase in wireless communication to improve its eavesdropping performance. We derive a new security attack from the pilot contamination phenomenon, which targets at systems using reverse training to obtain the CSI at the transmitter for precoder design. This attack changes the precoder used by the legitimate transmitter in a controlled manner to strengthen the signal reception at the eavesdropper during data transmission. Furthermore, we discuss an efficient use of the transmission energy of an advanced full-duplex eavesdropper to simultaneously achieve a satisfactory eavesdropping performance whilst degrading the detection performance of the legitimate receiver.
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.