Detecting Malicious Pilot Contamination in Multiuser Massive MIMO Using Decision Trees
This work addresses security vulnerabilities in wireless communication systems like 5G/6G, offering a more robust detection method for malicious attacks, though it is incremental as it applies an existing machine learning technique to a specific domain problem.
The paper tackles the problem of detecting pilot contamination attacks in massive MIMO systems by proposing a Decision Tree algorithm, which outperforms a classical likelihood ratio testing method, achieving better detection probability in noisy and low-power scenarios without requiring prior knowledge of noise or signal power.
Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MMIMO) is essential to modern wireless communication systems, like 5G and 6G, but it is vulnerable to active eavesdropping attacks. One type of such attack is the pilot contamination attack (PCA), where a malicious user copies pilot signals from an authentic user during uplink, intentionally interfering with the base station's (BS) channel estimation accuracy. In this work, we propose to use a Decision Tree (DT) algorithm for PCA detection at the BS in a multi-user system. We present a methodology to generate training data for the DT classifier and select the best DT according to their depth. Then, we simulate different scenarios that could be encountered in practice and compare the DT to a classical technique based on likelihood ratio testing (LRT) submitted to the same scenarios. The results revealed that a DT with only one level of depth is sufficient to outperform the LRT. The DT shows a good performance regarding the probability of detection in noisy scenarios and when the malicious user transmits with low power, in which case the LRT fails to detect the PCA. We also show that the reason for the good performance of the DT is its ability to compute a threshold that separates PCA data from non-PCA data better than the LRT's threshold. Moreover, the DT does not necessitate prior knowledge of noise power or assumptions regarding the signal power of malicious users, prerequisites typically essential for LRT and other hypothesis testing methodologies.