Enhance Security of Time-Modulated Array-Enabled Directional Modulation by Introducing Symbol Ambiguity

TL;DR

This paper investigates vulnerabilities in TMA-enabled directional modulation systems and proposes a novel symbol ambiguity method to enhance security against grid search attacks, validated by bit error rate measurements.

Contribution

It introduces symbol ambiguity principles for TMA design, including rank deficiency and non-uniqueness, to improve security against eavesdroppers.

Findings

Grid search can crack TMA DM systems without defenses.

Symbol ambiguity effectively prevents eavesdropper decoding.

Proposed principles enhance TMA security theoretically and practically.

Abstract

In this paper, if the time-modulated array (TMA)-enabled directional modulation (DM) communication system can be cracked is investigated and the answer is YES! We first demonstrate that the scrambling data received at the eavesdropper can be defied by using grid search to successfully find the only and actual mixing matrix generated by TMA. Then, we propose introducing symbol ambiguity to TMA to defend the defying of grid search, and design two principles for the TMA mixing matrix, i.e., rank deficiency and non-uniqueness of the ON-OFF switching pattern, that can be used to construct the symbol ambiguity. Also, we present a feasible mechanism to implement these two principles. Our proposed principles and mechanism not only shed light on how to design a more secure TMA DM system theoretically in the future, but also have been validated to be effective by bit error rate measurements.