False Data Injection Attack Detection Before Decoding in DF Cooperative Relay Network

False data injection (FDI) attacks could happen in decode-and-forward (DF) wireless cooperative relay networks. Although physical integrity check (PIC) can combat that by applying physical layer detection, the detector depends on the decoding results and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) further deteriorates the detecting results. In this paper, a physical layer detect-before-decode (DbD) method is proposed, which has low computational complexity with no sacrifice of false alarm and miss detection rates. One significant advantage of this method is the detector does not depend on the decoding results. In order to implement the proposed DbD method, a unified error sufficient statistic (UESS) containing the full information of FDI attacks is constructed. The proposed UESS simplifies the detector because it is applicable to all link conditions, which means there is no need to deal each link condition with a specialized sufficient statistic. Moreover, the source to destination outage probability (S2Dop) of the DF cooperative relay network utilizing the proposed DbD method is studied. Finally, numerical simulations verify the good performance of this DbD method.