Vulnerability Analysis of Dynamic Directional Modulations: a Multi-Sensor Receiver Attack

Physical layer security is a means of guaranteeing the secrecy of wireless communications by exploiting the physical properties of the transmission channel, thus eliminating the need to share confidential keys with the legitimate receiver. Among existing physical layer encryption methods, we focus on one in particular, called dynamic Directional Modulation (DM), combined with an efficient power amplification method referred to as Linear Amplification with Non-Linear Component (LINC). By employing this joint LINC-DM approach, both security and energy efficiency are significantly improved. The work presented here focuses on the vulnerability of such kind of transmission system, demonstrating how it can be attacked by leveraging on a multi-sensor receiver deployment. To our knowledge, this is the first attack dedicated to dynamic DM systems. The attack scenario is supported by a theoretical analysis of the accuracy of the decoded message compared with the original message.