Pilot Contamination Attack Detection by Key-Confirmation in Secure MIMO Systems

TL;DR

This paper proposes a key-confirmation method for detecting pilot contamination attacks in secure MIMO systems, enhancing physical layer security by enabling legitimate parties to verify their channel estimates and reduce information leakage.

Contribution

It introduces a novel channel comparison technique for PCA detection in MIMO systems, with analysis and numerical evaluation demonstrating improved secrecy performance.

Findings

The proposed method effectively detects PCA under certain assumptions.

Numerical results show reduced secrecy outage probability.

The approach enhances physical layer security in MIMO systems.

Abstract

Many security techniques working at the physical layer need a correct channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter, especially when devices are equipped with multiple antennas. Therefore such techniques are vulnerable to pilot contamination attacks (PCAs) by which an attacker aims at inducing false CSI. In this paper we provide a solution to some PCA methods, by letting two legitimate parties to compare their channel estimates. The comparison is made in order to minimize the information leakage on the channel to a possible attacker. By reasonable assumptions on both the channel knowledge by the attacker and the correlation properties of the attacker and legitimate channels we show the validity of our solution. An accurate analysis of possible attacks and countermeasures is provided, together with a numerical evaluation of the attainable secrecy outage probability when our solution is used in conjunction with beamforming for secret communications.