Vulnerability and Protection of Channel State Information in Multiuser MIMO Networks

Tung, Yu-Chih; Han, Sihui; Chen, Dongyao; Shin, Kang G.

doi:10.1145/2660267.2660272

Cited by 48 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…Wang et al [20] propose a novel Sybil attack detection based on CSI, and the detection algorithm can tell whether the static devices are Sybil attackers. Tung et al [18] evaluate sniffing attack (enables concurrently transmitting malicious clients to eavesdrop other ongoing transmissions) and power attack (enables malicious clients to enhance their own capacity at the expense of others') and they propose a novel CSI feedback system to prevent CSI forging without requiring any modification at the client side.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Find me a safe zone: A countermeasure for channel state information based attacks

Zhang

Tang

et al. 2019

Computers & Security

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Recently, channel state information (CSI) is shown to be an effective side-channel to perform attacks in public environments. Prior work has demonstrated that by analyzing how the CSI measurements of the wireless signal are affected by the mobile user's finger movements or gestures, an attacker can recover the user's input with a high success rate. Furthermore, the setup of this new attack is trivial, where the adversary only needs to place one or two malicious wireless devices near the target user. It would be difficult for many users to identify the nearby malicious devices while they want to continue to use mobile applications in public places. This dilemma makes protection of CSI-based attacks an urgent need. This article presents the first countermeasure for CSI-based attacks. Our key insight is that the success of any CSI-based attack requires high-quality CSI measurements; and we can significantly reduce the risk of information leakage by directing the user to a nearby location where the CSI readings are inherently noisy. To this end, we develop a regression based method to assess the risk of CSI-based attacks and exploit a well-established localization technique to identify potential malicious wireless devices. We then use this information to guide the user to a safe zone. We evaluate our approach by applying it to protect pattern lock and keystrokes in various indoor and outdoor environments. Experimental results show that our approach can effectively protect mobile users against CSI-based attacks.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Find me a safe zone: A countermeasure for channel state information based attacks

Zhang

Tang

et al. 2019

Computers & Security

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“…In [10], the authors mainly analyzed the influence on Quality-of-Service (QoS) for honest receivers caused by various forms of malicious channel feedback, and showed that the presence of just a single adversary could degrade the system performance significantly. Then, for the purposes of eavesdropping and selfish, the impact of channel state misreporting of a malicious user was studied in [4] for a multi-user MIMO system that broadcasts independent messages to multiple users. The proposed "sniffing attack" is an example of the channel direction modified CSI misreporting, which enables the attacker to eavesdrop the signal sent to the legitimate user.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The proposed "sniffing attack" is an example of the channel direction modified CSI misreporting, which enables the attacker to eavesdrop the signal sent to the legitimate user. Besides, the "power attack" proposed in [4] is to manipulate the Access Point's power allocation. By modifying the reported channel magnitude, the adversary can enhance its own capacity at the expense of others'.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impact of Channel State Misreporting on Multi-user Massive MIMO Scheduling Performance

Zhang

Sun

Sabharwal

et al. 2018

IEEE INFOCOM 2018 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications

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The robustness of system throughput with scheduling is a critical issue. In this paper, we analyze the sensitivity of multi-user scheduling performance to channel misreporting in systems with massive antennas. The main result is that for the round-robin scheduler combined with max-min power control, the channel magnitude misreporting is harmful to the scheduling performance and has a different impact from the purely physical layer analysis. Specifically, for the homogeneous users that have equal average signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), underreporting is harmful, while overreporting is beneficial to others. In underreporting, the asymptotic rate loss on others is derived, which is tight when the number of antennas is huge. One interesting observation in our research is that the rate loss "periodically" increases and decreases as the number of misreporters grows. For the heterogeneous users that have various SNRs, both underreporting and overreporting can degrade the scheduler performance. We observe that strong misreporting changes the user grouping decision and hence greatly decreases some users' rates regardless of others gaining rate improvements, while with carefully designed weak misreporting, the scheduling decision keeps fixed and the rate loss on others is shown to grow nearly linearly with the number of misreporters.

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“…For instance, in [7,8], Schulz et al presented an attack toward [6] under an multi-antenna eavesdropper setting. In [13], Tung et al showed two active, single-antenna attacks toward MIMO systems protected by orthogonal blinding.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Profiling the Strength of Physical-Layer Security

Zheng

Schulz

Lou

et al. 2016

Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Security &Amp; Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks

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Physical layer security for wireless communication is broadly considered as a promising approach to protect data confidentiality against eavesdroppers. However, despite its ample theoretical foundation, the transition to practical implementations of physical-layer security still lacks success. A close inspection of proven vulnerable physical-layer security designs reveals that the flaws are usually overlooked when the scheme is only evaluated against an inferior, single-antenna eavesdropper. Meanwhile, the attacks exposing vulnerabilities often lack theoretical justification. To reduce the gap between theory and practice, we posit that a physical-layer security scheme must be studied under multiple adversarial models to fully grasp its security strength. In this regard, we evaluate a specific physical-layer security scheme, i.e. orthogonal blinding, under multiple eavesdropper settings. We further propose a practical "ciphertext-only attack" that allows eavesdroppers to recover the original message by exploiting the low entropy fields in wireless packets. By means of simulation, we are able to reduce the symbol error rate (SER) at an eavesdropper below 1% using only the eavesdropper's receiving data and a general knowledge about the format of the wireless packets.

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Vulnerability and Protection of Channel State Information in Multiuser MIMO Networks

Cited by 48 publications

References 46 publications

Find me a safe zone: A countermeasure for channel state information based attacks

Find me a safe zone: A countermeasure for channel state information based attacks

Impact of Channel State Misreporting on Multi-user Massive MIMO Scheduling Performance

Profiling the Strength of Physical-Layer Security

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