Exploiting Beam Features for Spoofing Attack Detection in mmWave 60-GHz IEEE 802.11ad Networks

Spoofing attacks pose a serious threat to wireless communications. Exploiting physical-layer features to counter spoofing attacks is a promising solution. Although various physical-layer spoofing attack detection (PL-SAD) techniques have been proposed for conventional 802.11 networks in the sub-6GHz band, the study of PL-SAD for 802.11ad networks in 5G millimeter wave (mmWave) 60GHz band is largely open. In this paper, to achieve efficient PL-SAD in 5G networks, we propose a unique physical layer feature in IEEE 802.11ad networks, i.e., the signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) trace obtained at the receiver in the sector level sweep (SLS) process. The SNR trace is readily extractable from the off-the-shelf device, and it is dependent on both transmitter location and intrinsic hardware impairment. Therefore, it can be used to achieve an efficient detection no matter the attacker is co-located with the legitimate transmitter or not. To achieve spoofing attack detection, we provide two methods based on different machine learning models. For the first method, the detection problem is formulated as a machine learning classification problem. To tackle the small sample learning and fast model construction challenges, we propose a novel neural network framework consisting of a backpropation network, a forward propagation network, and generative adversarial networks (GANs). Another method involves a Siamese network, in which the similarity between sample pairs from one device is used to achieve PL-SAD. It can tackle the training problem that the historical data cannot support the identification of the same device in a new communication session. We conduct experiments using off-the-shelf 802.11ad devices, Talon AD7200s and MG360, to evaluate the performance of the proposed PL-SAD schemes. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed PL-SAD schemes, and the detection accuracy can reach 99% using small sample sizes under different scenarios.