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

Abstract

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 pilots and the received data signals for uplink channel estimation. We show analytically that when the number of transmit antennas and the length of the data vector both 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 that 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 singleuser 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 singleuser massive MIMO system in the absence of eavesdroppers. Numerical results indicate that the proposed scheme achieves significant secrecy rate gains compared to alternative approaches based on matched filter precoding with artificial noise generation and null space transmission.

Physical layer security for massive access in cellular Internet of Things

“…• Pilot sequence [61]: The eavesdropper sends the same pilot sequence as that of the targeted device. This way may degrade the secrecy performance more severely.…”

Safeguarding MTC at the Physical Layer: Potentials and Challenges

“…In [29], a secure communication for time-division duplex multi-cell multi-user massive MIMO systems was investigated when an active eavesdropping performs PCAs. Therein, it was shown that decreasing the desired user's signal power can be beneficial to combat a strong active attack from an eavesdropper.…”

Uplink Channel Estimation and Signal Extraction Against Malicious IRS in Massive MIMO System

“…Note that the proposed signal extraction depends on the minimum of L {F {uY}}, where L {F {uY}} remains unchanged when the angles of its input are rotated. On the other hand, optimization problem (8) just indicates that the extracted signal belongs to one user, but it cannot determine which user corresponds to the extracted signal. Thus, order ambiguity also exists.…”

“…The normalized mean square error (NMSE) of the channel estimation and the bit error rate (BER) of separation signal are also selected as a performance metric. We simulate and compare the performance of our proposed method in this paper, the bounded component analysis (BCA) method [14] and the eigenvalue decomposition (EVD)-based method [8]. Also, we simulate the performance that achieved under perfect CSI.…”