A two-way training method for defending against pilot spoofing attack in MISO systems

In a time-division duplex (TDD) based multi-input single-output (MISO) system, the channel state information (CSI) can be obtained during the channel estimation phase in which the receiver transmits the pilot symbols to the transmitter. This scheme may suffer from a so-called pilot spoofing attack, i.e., an adversary may send identical pilot signals as those of the legitimate receiver to spoof the transmitter. The resultant channel estimate may then contain the CSI of both legitimate and illegitimate receivers, and if such estimated channel is used for transmit beamforming, the information dedicated for legitimate receiver will leak to the illegitimate receiver. In this paper, we study the detection and defending strategies for such pilot spoofing attack. A two-way training based scheme is proposed. The durations of the training periods are also designed to optimize the secrecy rate. Finally, numerical results are presented to show the performance of our proposed method.