Secure Transmission against Pilot Spoofing Attack: A Random Matrix Theory Based Scheme

Pilot spoofing attack may lead to a huge secrecy information leakage to the eavesdroppers. In the paper, we investigate the scheme of secure transmission against spoofing attack in the physical layer of a time-division duplex (TDD) system with large-scale base station (BS) antennas. First, a novel pilot spoofing attack detection method is put forward based on a modified flexible detection criterion (FDC) using random matrix theory (RMT). To ensure secure transmission, artificial noise (AN) is then utilized to confuse eavesdroppers in the downlink transmission phase by degrading the channels of eavesdroppers. Finally, the secrecy capacity is analyzed to show the security level of the data transmission. From the numerical results we see that better performance can be achieved using our scheme of spoofing attack detection, and higher secrecy capacity can be guaranteed when total transmission power is larger.