Detection of pilot spoofing attack in multi-antenna systems using modified FDC criterion: A random matrix approach

Abstract

We investigate the detection of one kind of active eavesdropping which happened in the physical layer of a timedivision-duplex (TDD) multi-antenna system, in which malicious eavesdroppers send the identical pilot signal in the uplink channel estimation phase to disguise as the legitimate receivers This attack could lead to a huge secrecy information leakage to the eavesdroppers, called pilot spoofing attack. Consider a multi-antenna system which has one base station with M antennas, N single-antenna users, and K single-antenna eavesdroppers. Aiming at the physical layer security which would be threatened by the pilot spoofing attack, we propose a novel pilot spoofing attack detection algorithm by using random matrix theory (RMT) to modify flexible detection criterion (FDC). The simulation shows that the detection performance of the modified FDC is much better than FDC, especially when the length of pilot signal becomes smaller and has the same order magnitude as M.