Physical-Layer Security in TDD Massive MIMO

Abstract

We consider a single-cell downlink time-division duplex-based massive MIMO communication in the presence of an adversary capable of jamming and eavesdropping simultaneously. We show that the massive MIMO communication is naturally resilient to no training-phase jamming attack in which the adversary jams only the data communication and eavesdrops both the data communication and the training. Specifically, we show that the secure degrees of freedom (SDoF) attained in the presence of such an attack are identical to the maximum DoF attainable under no attack. Furthermore, we evaluate the number of base station (BS) antennas necessary in order to establish information theoretic security without even a need for Wyner encoding for a given rate of information leakage to the attacker. Next, we show that things are completely different once the adversary starts jamming the training phase. Specifically, we consider the pilot contamination attack, called training-phase jamming in which the adversary jams and eavesdrops both the training and the data communication. We show that under such an attack, the maximum achieved SDoF is identical to zero. Furthermore, the maximum achievable secure rates of users also vanish, even in the asymptotic regime in the number of the BS antennas. We finally address this attack and show that, under training-phase jamming, if the number of pilot signals is scaled in a certain way and the pilot signal assignments can be hidden from the adversary, the users achieve an SDoF identical to the maximum achievable DoF under no attack.