Physical Layer Security for Massive MIMO: An Overview on Passive Eavesdropping and Active Attacks

TL;DR

This paper reviews physical layer security in massive MIMO systems, highlighting robustness against passive eavesdropping, vulnerabilities to active pilot contamination attacks, and discussing detection methods and future research directions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of security challenges in massive MIMO, including passive and active attack vulnerabilities and potential detection strategies.

Findings

MaMIMO is robust against passive eavesdropping

Pilot contamination significantly reduces secrecy capacity

Active attack detection methods are reviewed

Abstract

This article discusses opportunities and challenges of physical layer security integration in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MaMIMO) systems. Specifically, we first show that MaMIMO itself is robust against passive eavesdropping attacks. We then review a pilot contamination scheme which actively attacks the channel estimation process. This pilot contamination attack is not only dramatically reducing the achievable secrecy capacity but is also difficult to detect. We proceed by reviewing some methods from literature that detect active attacks on MaMIMO. The last part of the paper surveys the open research problems that we believe are the most important to address in the future and give a few promising directions of research to solve them.