Physical Layer Security for Massive MIMO: An Overview on Passive Eavesdropping and Active Attacks

Summary, in English

This article discusses opportunities and challenges of physical layer security integration in MaMIMO systems. Specifically, we first show that MaMIMO itself is robust against passive eavesdropping attacks. We then review a pilot contamination scheme that actively attacks the channel estimation process. This pilot contamination attack not only dramatically reduces the achievable secrecy capacity but is also difficult to detect. We proceed by reviewing some methods from literature that detect active attacks on MaMIMO. The last part of the article surveys the open research problems that we believe are the most important to address in the future and give a few promising directions of research to solve them.

• Author: Dzevdan Kapetanovic; Gan Zheng; Fredrik Rusek
• Department/s: Department of Electrical and Information Technology; ELLIIT: the Linköping-Lund initiative on IT and mobile communication
• Publishing year: 2015
• Language: English
• Pages: 21-27
• Publication/Series: IEEE Communications Magazine
• Volume: 53
• Issue: 6
• Document type: Journal article
• Publisher: IEEE - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
• Topic: Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering
• Status: Published
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISSN: 0163-6804