With millimeter wave (mmWave) wireless communication envisioned to be the key enabler of next generation high data rate wireless networks, security is of paramount importance. While conventional security measures in wireless networks operate at a higher layer of the protocol stack, physical layer security utilizes unique device dependent hardware features to identify and authenticate legitimate devices. In this work, we identify that the manufacturing tolerances in the antenna arrays used in mmWave devices contribute to a beam pattern that is unique to each device, and to that end we propose a novel device fingerprinting scheme based on the unique beam pattern of different codebooks used by the mmWave devices. Specifically, we propose a fingerprinting scheme with multiple access points (APs) to take advantage of the rich spatial-temporal information of the beam pattern. We perform comprehensive experiments with commercial off-the-shelf mmWave devices to validate the reliability performance of our proposed method under various scenarios. We also compare our beam pattern feature with a conventional physical layer feature namely power spectral density feature (PSD). To that end, we implement PSD feature based fingerprinting for mmWave devices. We show that the proposed multiple APs scheme is able to achieve over 99% identification accuracy for stationary LOS and NLOS scenarios and significantly outperform the PSD feature fingerprinting method. For mobility scenarios, the overall identification accuracy is 96%. In addition, we perform security analysis of our proposed beam pattern fingerprinting system and PSD fingerprinting system by studying the feasibility of performing impersonation attacks. We design and implement an impersonation attack mechanism for mmWave wireless networks using state-of-the-art 60 GHz software defined radios. We discuss our findings and their implications on the security of the mmWave wireless networks.
Next generation wireless communication networks utilizing 60 GHz millimeter wave (mmWave) frequency bands are expected to achieve multi-gigabit throughput with the use of highly directional phased-array antennas. These directional signal beams provide enhanced security to the legitimate networks due to the increased difficulties of eavesdropping. However, there still exists significant possibility of eavesdropping since 1) the reflections of the signal beam from ambient reflectors enables opportunistic stationary eavesdropping attacks, and; 2) carefully designed beam exploration strategy enables active nomadic eavesdropping attack. This paper discusses eavesdropper attack strategies for 802.11ad mmWave systems and provides the first analytical model to characterize the success possibility of eavesdropping in both opportunistic stationary attacks and active nomadic attacks. We derive the success probability of eavesdropping considering the ambient reflectors in the environment and errors introduced in the beam exploration strategies of the proposed eavesdropping attacker models. We study the success probability for both opportunistic stationary attack scenario and active nomadic attack scenario through numerical simulations. In addition to numerical simulations, we also evaluate the proposed attacker models using an 802.11ad test bed consisting of commercially available off-the-shelf devices. INDEX TERMS Millimeter wave communications, 802.11ad, stochastic geometry, success probability, eavesdropping attack.
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