Detection of pilot spoofing attack in multi-antenna systems via energy-ratio comparison

We study a spoofing attack happened in the physical layer of a multiple-antenna system, where an adversary tries to spoof the transmitter by sending the identical pilot (training) signal as that of a legitimate receiver in the uplink channel estimation phase. This attack, named as pilot spoofing attack, could lead to a secrecy information leakage to the adversary and information rate decrease at the legitimate receiver. Due to the serious results caused by the pilot spoofing attack, we propose an energy-ratio detector (ERD) to protect the legitimate components. The ERD makes the decision by exploiting the asymmetry of the received signal strength (RSS) between the transmitter and the legitimate receiver when the system is under the pilot spoofing attack. Numerical results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed detector.