A Physical Layer Spoofing Attack in Spatial Modulation

Abstract

Spoofing is a general attack in wireless communication and can cause further attacks like denial of service, node hijack and so on. Extensive studies have focused on the performance analysis under specific spoofing attack, or the countermeasures to detect and remove the spoofing attacks. Modulation based spoofing has proven to be an effective attack at the physical layer. Meanwhile, spatial modulation (SM) has high spectral efficiency and low complexity capabilities. And relay cooperation was introduced to further enhance the security of SM, under a basic assumption that all relays are trusted and fully cooperative. However, malicious relay may destroy the advantage of SM. This is the first time that the spoofing problem is studied for SM. We first model the modulation based spoofing attack particular to SM, and then derive the average spoofing- symbol-success-rate (SSSR) to describe the spoofer successfully modify the symbol. Numerical results show that the spoofing attack can badly destroy the communication.