Physical Layer Security Issues in Massive MIMO and GNSS

Ziya Gülgün

feb 2021 · Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Licentiate Thesis Libro 1899 · Linköping University Electronic Press

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Wireless communication technology has evolved rapidly during the last 20 years. Nowadays, there are huge networks providing communication infrastructures to not only people but also to machines, such as unmanned air and ground vehicles, cars, household appliances and so on. There is no doubt that new wireless communication technologies must be developed, that support the data traffic in these emerging, large networks. While developing these technologies, it is also important to investigate the vulnerability of these technologies to different malicious attacks. In particular, spoofing and jamming attacks should be investigated and new countermeasure techniques should be developed. In this context, spoofing refers to the situation in which a receiver identifies falsified signals, that are transmitted by the spoofers, as legitimate or trustable signals. Jamming, on the other hand, refers to the transmission of radio signals that disrupt communications by decreasing the signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) on the receiver side. 

In this thesis, we analyze the effects of spoofing and jamming both on global navigation satellite system (GNSS) and on massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communications. GNSS is everywhere and used to provide location information. Massive MIMO is one of the cornerstone technologies in 5G. We also propose countermeasure techniques to the studied spoofing and jamming attacks. 

More specifically, in paper A we analyze the effects of distributed jammers on massive MIMO and answer the following questions: Is massive MIMO more robust to distributed jammers compared with previous generation’s cellular networks? Which jamming attack strategies are the best from the jammer’s perspective, and can the jamming power be spread over space to achieve more harmful attacks? In paper B, we propose a detector for GNSS receivers that is able to detect multiple spoofers without having any prior information about the attack strategy or the number of spoofers in the environment.