Location Verification System for Pilot Spoofing Attack Detection

Pilot spoofing attack happens in the physical layer during the uplink pilot training stage. A malicious adversary sends identical pilot signals as a legitimate user, which can disrupt legitimate communications and lead to severe information leakage. In this paper, we propose a novel method using location verification to detect pilot spoofing attack. Specifically, we adopt several auxiliary devices in different locations to measure received signal strength (RSS), based on which, we then detect the spoofing attack by comparing the path-loss-based location and the algorithm-estimated location. Compared to the existing methods, our scheme does not need an uplink-downlink two-stage training, or alter the pilot structure. Simulation results show that our proposed method can provide excellent detection performance.