An Energy-Ratio-Based Approach for Detecting Pilot Spoofing Attack in Multiple-Antenna Systems

Abstract

The pilot spoofing attack is one kind of active eavesdropping conducted by a malicious user during the channel estimation phase of the legitimate transmission. In this attack, an intelligent adversary spoofs the transmitter on the estimation of channel state information (CSI) by sending the identical pilot signal as the legitimate receiver, in order to obtain a larger information rate in the data transmission phase. The pilot spoofing attack could also drastically weaken the strength of the received signal at the legitimate receiver if the adversary utilizes large enough power. Motivated by the serious problems the pilot spoofing attack could cause, we propose an efficient detector, named energy ratio detector (ERD), by exploring the asymmetry of received signal power levels at the transmitter and the legitimate receiver when there exists a pilot spoofing attack. Our analysis shows that by setting the ratio of received signal power levels at the transmitter and the legitimate receiver as the test statistic, the detecting threshold is derived without using the knowledge of the CSI of the legitimate channel as well as the illegitimate channel. Furthermore, we study the performance of the proposed ERD in various special cases in order to obtain useful insights. Numerical results are presented to further demonstrate the performance of our proposed ERD.Index Terms-Physical layer security, pilot spoofing attack, energy ratio detector, active eavesdropping.

Full-Duplex Cyber-Weapon With Massive Arrays

“…The case of partial channel state information is available at the legitimate users was also considered. The spoofing attack, in which the active adversary tries to modify the channel state information (CSI) of the legitimate channel to obtain more confidential information, was considered in [24].…”

Self-Contamination for Detection of Pilot Contamination Attack in Multiple Antenna Systems

“…We follow the system model of [2], [6]. Let s t (n), 1 ≤ n ≤ T , denote the training sequence of length T time samples.…”

“…This issue of pilot contamination attack was first noted in [1] and subsequent work on this topic has been sparse [2], [6] in spite of the potential severe consequences of such attacks. Ref.…”

“…[1] investigates enhancing eavesdropper's performance, while [2] discusses detection of the attack via a random training method tied to massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. In [6] asymmetry of received signals' power levels at Alice and Bob is exploited to design an attack detector. It is based on reverse training from Bob to Alice as well as a subsequent transmission from Alice to Bob relaying received signal power level of Bob-to-Alice transmission.…”

Channel-Based Sybil Detection in Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks: A Multi-Kernel Approach

“…The defense schemes against Sybil attack can be categorized into two types: radio resource testing [4] by exploring the resource characteristics of various physical terminals; and key pre-distribution [5] which utilizes key paired identification and key validation verification. However, the limited computational resources of sensors and time-delay validation of packets in WSNs, may decrease the capability of cryptographic protocols.…”