Physical Layer Spoofing Detection in MIMO SVD Communications

Future 6G communication networks have the challenging task to deliver critical services for society's everyday lives. In this scope, security is a key concern in wireless systems, in which these technologies must be resilient to potential security breaches of hostile users. Due to the open nature of wireless communications, it is important and necessary to employ Physical Layer security (PLS) transmission techniques, which take advantage of channel randomness to achieve communication confidentiality, authentication and counteract spoofing attackers. In this study, we consider a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) singular value decomposition (MIMO-SVD) system and propose a method to identify if legitimate communication is being targeted by impersonation attacks. This solution is based on tracking the first singular values due to their characteristic of possessing important information about the uniqueness of the transmission channel, which will differ between the legitimate and illegitimate channels. We show, through theoretical-numeric work, that it is possible to detect the illegitimate spoofing signal by monitoring the evolution of the MIMO channel, with a given probability of detection and false alarm, obtained using the hypothesis test.