Securing Channel State Information in Multiuser MIMO With Limited Feedback

Abstract

The potential of multiuser MIMO (MU-MIMO) to increase network capacity has been intensively studied. To enable concurrent transmission in Frequency-Division Duplex (FDD) systems with limited feedback, users have to report the estimated channel state information (CSI) to the base station (BS) for interference elimination, which however has been proven to be vulnerable. In this paper, we reveal how to utilize the CSI feedbacks to launch sniffing attacks in a deterministic way, where the sniffing attack enables the attackers to eavesdrop other users in the same transmission group. We conduct a rigorous theoretical analysis on the construction of the forged CSI. In the proposed sniffing attacks, the malicious users can successfully sniff other users’ messages without knowing their own messages for signal cancellation. To make sniffing attacks more practical, we explore the possibilities of sniffing multiple users by a coalition of malicious users or a single malicious user. To thwart sniffing attacks, we design a novel secure CSI feedback (SCF) protocol based on the random masking technique, which requires simple modifications at the BS and incurs a little additional workload. Extensive theoretical analysis and experimental results are provided to further validate the effectiveness of our proposed sniffing attacks and the corresponding countermeasure.