A New Technique to Improve the 2-N-PSK Method for Detecting Wireless Pilot Contamination Attacks

Wireless communication systems are very vulnerable to pilot contamination attacks, which represents a major physical layer security issue. Hence, it is necessary to apply different approaches and methods to the detection of this type of attack. One effective method proposed in the literature is 2-N-PSK pilot detection, which consists of training with two random N-PSK pilots. Although the method is broadly effective, it is not able to detect an attack initiated during the transmission of the second pilot of the pair in the case when both the legitimate and non-legitimate pilots coincide. In this paper, an improvement to this method is proposed to detect an intrusion which misses the first pilot transmission and initiates an attack during the second training period. This improved technique is based on channel gain comparison and eliminates the need to use threshold values in the detection – a drawback of previously-existing solutions. Key-Words: Wireless communication systems, Physical layer security, Pilot contamination attacks, 2-N-PSK pilot detection method, Channel state information, Detection statistic.