On the Security of Millimeter Wave Vehicular Communication Systems using Random Antenna Subsets

Millimeter wave (mmWave) vehicular communica tion systems have the potential to improve traffic efficiency and safety. Lack of secure communication links, however, may lead to a formidable set of abuses and attacks. To secure communication links, a physical layer precoding technique for mmWave vehicular communication systems is proposed in this paper. The proposed technique exploits the large dimensional antenna arrays available at mmWave systems to produce direction dependent transmission. This results in coherent transmission to the legitimate receiver and artificial noise that jams eavesdroppers with sensitive receivers. Theoretical and numerical results demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of the proposed technique and show that the proposed technique provides high secrecy throughput when compared to conventional array and switched array transmission techniques

Impact of imperfect angle estimation on spatial and directional modulation

In this paper, we investigate the impact of imperfect angle estimation (IAE) on spatial and directional modulation (SDM) systems, assuming that the signal experiences line of sight (LoS) propagation. In SDM systems with IAE, the variation is analyzed in detail, when there is a mismatch between the beamforming and precise channel matrices. Based on the union bound and statistics theory, the average bit error probabilities (ABEPs) for both the legitimate user and eavesdropper are derived. In addition, the ergodic rate is also quantified with IAE. Simulation results are presented to show that the achieved theoretical ABEPs are useful in quantifying the potential performance penalty. We also show that the mismatch between the beamforming and precise channel matrices will become greater with the increase in direction measurement error (DME), which affects the detection for both the legitimate user and eavesdropper. On the other hand, due to the effect of IAE, the SDM requires more signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gain to achieve a stable ergodic secrecy rate

An attack on antenna subset modulation for millimeter wave communication

Antenna subset modulation (ASM) is a physical layer security technique that is well suited for millimeter wave communication systems. The key idea is to vary the radiation pattern at the symbol rate by selecting one from a subset of patterns with a similar main lobe and different side lobes. This paper shows that ASM is not robust to an eavesdropper that makes multiple simultaneous measurements at multiple angles. The measurements are combined and used to formulate an estimation problem to undo the effects of the side lobe randomization. Simulations show the performance of the estimation algorithms and how the eavesdropper can effectively recover the information if the signal-to-noise ratio exceeds a certain threshold. Using fewer active radio frequency chains makes it harder for the attacker to recover the transmit symbol, at the expense of more grating lobes