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IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security

Secure Communication in Relay-Assisted Massive MIMO Downlink With Active Pilot Attacks

Dhanushka Priyankara Kudathanthirige, Santosh Timilsina, Gayan Amarasuriya Aruma Baduge

Published Feb 26, 2019• 18 citations
Publisher

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1109/tifs.2019.2901825

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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, secure transmission strategies for the relay-assisted massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) downlink are investigated by using artificial noise (AN) generation and by exploiting the excess degrees-of-freedom through the random and null-space based precoders. The achievable rate expressions are derived for the estimated channel state information, and hence, the detrimental effects of channel estimation errors in designing precoders are quantified. Specifically, the achievable secrecy rate at the relayed user nodes is derived in closed-form, and thereby, the performance gap between the random and null-space based precoders is investigated. Our performance analysis reveals that the AN generation by using random precoders can be employed to design secure physical layer transmission strategies for the relay-assisted massive MIMO downlink systems. The AN generation can be useful in the finite antenna regime for guaranteeing physical layer security in the base-station-to-relay hop of the relay-assisted massive MIMO downlink. Although the AN generated at the base-station propagates to the relay-to-user hop via amplify-and-forward operation at the relay, sophisticated security provisions are needed to secure the end-to-end transmission when the relay is equipped with finitely many antennas. Consequently, the performance gap between the random and null-space based precoders gradually diminishes in the limit of infinitely many base-station antennas. Nevertheless, the achievable secrecy rate steadily vanishes with an increasing number of antennas at the passive eavesdropper.
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.
In this paper, we investigate secure and reliable transmission strategies for multi-cell multi-user massive multipleinput multiple-output (MIMO) systems in the presence of an 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 towards the eavesdropper, thus increasing its received signal power. We derive an asymptotic achievable secrecy rate for matched filter precoding and artificial noise (AN) generation at the transmitter when the number of transmit antennas goes to infinity. For the achievability scheme at hand, we obtain the optimal power allocation policy for the transmit signal and the AN in closed form. For the case of correlated fading channels, we show that the impact of the active eavesdropper can be completely removed if the transmit correlation matrices of the users and the eavesdropper are orthogonal. Inspired by this result, we propose a precoder null space design exploiting the low rank property of the transmit correlation matrices of massive MIMO channels, which can significantly degrade the eavesdropping capabilities of the active eavesdropper.
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.
The achievable secrecy rates for a cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) in the presence of a single-antenna active eavesdropper are derived and compared with that of co-located massive MIMO. The active eavesdropper contaminates the uplink channel estimates at the access points (APs), and the downlink precoders at the APs are constructed based on this contaminated channel estimates. Hence, the APs inadvertently beamform confidential information towards the active eavesdropper during the downlink transmission. The achievable rates at the legitimate user nodes and the rates leaked into the active eavesdropper are derived for estimated/imperfect channel state information in the finite and infinite regimes of the number of APs. A transmit power allocation algorithm for maximizing the achievable secrecy rate is developed. Our analysis and numerical results reveal that the rate leaked into the eavesdropper can be of significance in the presence of active pilot attacks in cell-free massive MIMO.
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