Physical Layer Security in Massive MIMO

Abstract: We consider a single-cell downlink massive MIMO communication in the presence of an adversary capable of jamming and eavesdropping simultaneously. We show that 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 (DoF) attained in the presence of such an attack is identical to the maximum DoF attained under no attack. Further, we evaluate the number of antennas that base station (BS) requires in order to establish information theoretic security without even a need for Wyner encoding. Next, we show that things are completely different once the adversary starts jamming the training phase. Specifically, we consider an 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 secure DoF is equal to zero. Furthermore, the maximum achievable rates of users vanish even in the asymptotic regime in the number of BS antennas. To counter this attack, we develop a defense strategy in which we use a secret key to encrypt the pilot sequence assignments to hide them from the adversary, rather than encrypt the data. We show that, if the cardinality of the set of pilot signals are scaled appropriately, hiding the pilot signal assignments from the adversary enables the users to achieve secure DoF, identical to the maximum achievable DoF under no attack. Finally, we discuss how computational cryptography is a legitimate candidate to hide the pilot signal assignments. Indeed, while information theoretic security is not achieved with cryptography, the computational power necessary for the adversary to achieve a non-zero mutual information leakage rate goes to infinity.