Detection of Pilot Spoofing Attack in Massive MIMO Systems

To secure the legitimate communication, this paper proposes a pilot spoofing attack detection algorithm in massive MIMO systems, in which the information of channel statistics is unknown. First, users send pilots to the base station (BS), then the BS transmits the conjugate of its received signal (which may contain spoofing signal) back to users, where the final decision on detection is made. Analytical analysis with respect to probabilities of detection (PD) and false alarm is conducted. It is revealed that PD converges in regimes of high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and large number of BS antennas, while the channel statistics from the active attacker to the BS influences the performance greatly.