Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

IEEE Access

Higher Secrecy Capacity by Successive Pilot Contamination and Jamming Cancellation

Awais Ahmed, Muhammad Zia, Naeem Bhatti, Hasan Mahmood, Huy-Dung Han

Published Jan 1, 2022• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1109/access.2022.3229615

Related papers

Physical Layer Security in a SISO Communication using Frequency-Domain Time-Reversal OFDM Precoding and Artificial Noise Injection

Sidney Golstein, François Rottenberg, François Horlin +2 more

A frequency domain (FD) time-reversal (TR) precoder is proposed to perform physical layer security (PLS) in single-input single-output (SISO) systems using orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) and artificial noise (AN) signal injection. The AN signal does not corrupt the data transmission to the legitimate receiver but degrades the decoding performance of the eavesdropper. This scheme guarantees the secrecy of a communication towards a legitimate user when the transmitter knows the instantaneous channel state information (CSI) of the legitimate link thanks to the channel reciprocity in time division duplex (TDD) systems, but does not know the instantaneous CSI of a potential eavesdropper. Three optimal decoding structures at the eavesdropper are considered in a fast fading (FF) environment depending on the handshake procedure between Alice and Bob. Closed-form approximations of the AN energy to inject in order to maximize the SR of the communication are derived. In addition, the required conditions at the legitimate receiver's end to guarantee a given SR are determined when Eve's signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is infinite. Furthermore, a waterfilling power allocation strategy is presented to further enhance the secrecy of the scheme. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the security performance of the proposed secure system.

arXiv:2011.06840•Nov 13, 2020•0 citations

A study on secure pilot signal design for OFDM systems

Kenta Umebayashi, F. Nakabayashi, Yasuo Suzuki

In this paper, we investigate a physical layer security technique in an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) based wireless communications. In an OFDM system, the legitimate transmitter (Alice) can increase secrecy capacity with proper power allocation and/or bit loading methods for example by maximizing mutual information for own communication, i.e. between Alice and the legitimate receiver (Bob). The reason of increasing secrecy capacity is that the power allocation is suitable for the channel state between Alice and Bob but not suitable for the channel state between Alice and the eavesdropper (Eve). In this paper, we investigate a new approach where dummy data is exploited to achieve further improvement of secrecy capacity. Specifically, real data and dummy data are implemented in transmit OFDM symbols and secure pilot signals are employed to inform the receiver about their respective locations. Two secure pilot signal designs are introduced and in both of them it is designed that Bob can easily detect correct real data locations but not for Eve. One of them uses fake pilot signals that cause Eve to mistakenly select dummy data as real data. Numerical results will show that secrecy capacity performance of the first secure pilot signal based secure communication (not using fake signal) is slightly less than the performance of water filling algorithm. One significant advantage of the first secure pilot signal based secure communication is that the computational cost should be significantly less than the water filling algorithm. In addition, we will show that fake pilot signal based secure communication can provide significant gain in secrecy capacity while the computational cost is still small.

Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference (APSIPA ASC)•Dec 1, 2014•6 citations

Physical Layer Security in an OFDM Time Reversal SISO Communication With Imperfect Channel State Information

Sidney Golstein, François Rottenberg, François Horlin +2 more

A frequency domain time-reversal (TR) precoder is proposed to perform physical layer security in single-input single-output (SISO) systems using orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) and artificial noise (AN) injection. This scheme guarantees the secrecy of a communication towards a legitimate user, Bob, by exploiting the frequency diversity selective behaviour in multipath channels. The transmitter, Alice, has imperfect channel state information (CSI) of the legitimate link thanks to the channel reciprocity in time division duplex systems and does not know the instantaneous CSI of a potential eavesdropper, Eve. Three optimal decoding structures at Eve are considered in a block fading environment depending on the handshake procedure between Alice and Bob. Closed-form approximations of the signal-to-noise ratio required at Bob and the maximal CSI error that can be made at Alice, in order to guarantee a communication ergodic secrecy rate (ESR), are derived. Furthermore, the optimal amount of AN energy to inject, considering imperfect CSI, is also given as a closed-form expression. A trade-off on the choice of the spreading factor of the TR precoder is established between maximizing the ESR and decreasing the$\boldsymbol {\epsilon }-$achievable secrecy rate. Finally, thanks to these results, Alice can be a priori aware of the ESR over which she can establish a secure communication.

IEEE Access•Jan 1, 2022•14 citations

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

Shengbin Lin, Kaizhi Huang, Wenyu Luo +1 more

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.

IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference•May 1, 2015•7 citations

Data-Aided Secure Massive MIMO Transmission Under the Pilot Contamination Attack

Yongpeng Wu, Chao-Kai Wen, Wen Chen +3 more

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.

arXiv:1902.08532•IEEE Transactions on Communications•Mar 27, 2019•31 citations

Two-stage uplink training for pilot spoofing attack detection and secure transmission

Jiandong Xie, Ying‐Chang Liang, Jun Fang +1 more

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.

International Conference on Communications•May 1, 2017•23 citations
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.
A frequency domain (FD) time-reversal (TR) precoder is proposed to perform physical layer security (PLS) in single-input single-output (SISO) systems using orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) and artificial noise (AN) signal injection. The AN signal does not corrupt the data transmission to the legitimate receiver but degrades the decoding performance of the eavesdropper. This scheme guarantees the secrecy of a communication towards a legitimate user when the transmitter knows the instantaneous channel state information (CSI) of the legitimate link thanks to the channel reciprocity in time division duplex (TDD) systems, but does not know the instantaneous CSI of a potential eavesdropper. Three optimal decoding structures at the eavesdropper are considered in a fast fading (FF) environment depending on the handshake procedure between Alice and Bob. Closed-form approximations of the AN energy to inject in order to maximize the SR of the communication are derived. In addition, the required conditions at the legitimate receiver's end to guarantee a given SR are determined when Eve's signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is infinite. Furthermore, a waterfilling power allocation strategy is presented to further enhance the secrecy of the scheme. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the security performance of the proposed secure system.
In this paper, we investigate a physical layer security technique in an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) based wireless communications. In an OFDM system, the legitimate transmitter (Alice) can increase secrecy capacity with proper power allocation and/or bit loading methods for example by maximizing mutual information for own communication, i.e. between Alice and the legitimate receiver (Bob). The reason of increasing secrecy capacity is that the power allocation is suitable for the channel state between Alice and Bob but not suitable for the channel state between Alice and the eavesdropper (Eve). In this paper, we investigate a new approach where dummy data is exploited to achieve further improvement of secrecy capacity. Specifically, real data and dummy data are implemented in transmit OFDM symbols and secure pilot signals are employed to inform the receiver about their respective locations. Two secure pilot signal designs are introduced and in both of them it is designed that Bob can easily detect correct real data locations but not for Eve. One of them uses fake pilot signals that cause Eve to mistakenly select dummy data as real data. Numerical results will show that secrecy capacity performance of the first secure pilot signal based secure communication (not using fake signal) is slightly less than the performance of water filling algorithm. One significant advantage of the first secure pilot signal based secure communication is that the computational cost should be significantly less than the water filling algorithm. In addition, we will show that fake pilot signal based secure communication can provide significant gain in secrecy capacity while the computational cost is still small.
A frequency domain time-reversal (TR) precoder is proposed to perform physical layer security in single-input single-output (SISO) systems using orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) and artificial noise (AN) injection. This scheme guarantees the secrecy of a communication towards a legitimate user, Bob, by exploiting the frequency diversity selective behaviour in multipath channels. The transmitter, Alice, has imperfect channel state information (CSI) of the legitimate link thanks to the channel reciprocity in time division duplex systems and does not know the instantaneous CSI of a potential eavesdropper, Eve. Three optimal decoding structures at Eve are considered in a block fading environment depending on the handshake procedure between Alice and Bob. Closed-form approximations of the signal-to-noise ratio required at Bob and the maximal CSI error that can be made at Alice, in order to guarantee a communication ergodic secrecy rate (ESR), are derived. Furthermore, the optimal amount of AN energy to inject, considering imperfect CSI, is also given as a closed-form expression. A trade-off on the choice of the spreading factor of the TR precoder is established between maximizing the ESR and decreasing theϵ−\boldsymbol {\epsilon }-ϵ−achievable secrecy rate. Finally, thanks to these results, Alice can be a priori aware of the ESR over which she can establish a secure communication.
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.
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 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.