Proactive Eavesdropping via Covert Pilot Spoofing Attack in Multi-Antenna Systems

Xingbo Lu,Yueming Cai,Xinrong Guan,Weiwei Yang

doi:10.1109/access.2019.2948078

Xingbo Lu, Yueming Cai + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2019.2948078

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Abstract

Proactive eavesdropping is an effective method for government to monitor suspicious users who are deemed to misuse communication systems for illegal activities. In this paper, considering that a legitimate full-duplex (FD) eavesdropper tries to monitor a dubious multi-antenna system, we propose a covert pilot spoofing attack (PSA) scheme to enhance the legitimate eavesdropping performance by taking the channel training phase into consideration. For the proposed covert PSA scheme, the total error detection probability and optimal detection threshold of suspicious source are derived as the worst case for the considered monitoring system. Given the optimal detection threshold, the closed-form expressions of effective eavesdropping rate are also derived based on the results of detection at suspicious source. Furthermore, an optimal power allocation algorithm to maximize the effective eavesdropping rate is proposed under the covert PSA and transmission power constraints. Simulation results illustrate that the adversary's uncertain about channel state information (CSI) before channel estimation process, can be exploited by legitimate eavesdropper to cover the PSA without being detected. Therefore, the proposed covert PSA scheme can achieve a better performance with respect to effective eavesdropping rate and effectively combat with a suspicious multi-antenna system.

Highlights

With the development of wireless communication technologies, various wireless communication applications and services profoundly change our daily life [1], [2]
OUR APPROACH AND CONTRIBUTIONS Motivated by the above analysis, in this paper, we propose a covert pilot spoofing attack (PSA) scheme to assist proactive eavesdropping, in which the PSA can be covered without being detected by exploiting the uncertainty of channels during the uplink training phase
For case II, the PSA is missed detection and some suspicious messages are directed to E, while some power of S is allocated to transmit interference with a random orientation for case III, which has more affect on D with respect to the received signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) since the performance of cognitive jamming becomes better with PS decreasing

Summary

INTRODUCTION

With the development of wireless communication technologies, various wireless communication applications and services profoundly change our daily life [1], [2]. It has been proven that the uncertainties in terms of jamming power [33]–[37], receiver noise power [39], [40] and the wireless fading channel [38], [41] can be exploited to achieve a positive covert communication rate, which provides a promising approach to launch active attacks without being detected for proactive eavesdropper. B. OUR APPROACH AND CONTRIBUTIONS Motivated by the above analysis, in this paper, we propose a covert PSA scheme to assist proactive eavesdropping, in which the PSA can be covered without being detected by exploiting the uncertainty of channels during the uplink training phase. As the practicable covert PSA power may be less than the pilot power of suspicious destination and most beams still be directed to suspicious destination, a active jamming scheme is adopted to improve the proactive eavesdropping performance during data transmission phase.

SYSTEM MODEL

SIMULATION RESULTS

CONCLUSION

E E hHSDh SD 2