Pilot spoofing attack detection and channel estimation for secure massive MIMO

Abstract Pilot spoofing attack (PSA) is an active eavesdropping attack in massive multiple‐input multiple‐output systems, where the eavesdroppers transmit the same pilot sequence as the legitimate user does to the base station to confuse the normal channel estimation during the uplink channel training phase. With the contaminated channel estimations, more information will be leaked to eavesdroppers in the downlink transmission phase. However, it is a challenging issue to detect the PSA attack due to the similarity of the received signals and the variations of the wireless channels. Here, a new PSA detection scheme by using the difference of two different estimators is presented, that is, the least square estimator and the minimum mean square error estimator, without requiring any priori of eavesdroppers. Following that, a new data‐aided channel estimation scheme is proposed to eliminate the PSA effect. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed PSA detection scheme outperforms the conventional energy detector, and more accurate legitimate channel estimation and higher sum secrecy rates can be obtained with the proposed scheme.