DL-Based Physical Tamper Attack Detection in OFDM Systems with Multiple Receiver Antennas: A Performance-Complexity Trade-Off

Sensors (Basel). 2022 Aug 30;22(17):6547. doi: 10.3390/s22176547.

Abstract

This paper proposes two deep-learning (DL)-based approaches to a physical tamper attack detection problem in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems with multiple receiver antennas based on channel state information (CSI) estimates. The physical tamper attack is considered as the unwanted change of antenna orientation at the transmitter or receiver. Approaching the tamper attack scenario as a semi-supervised anomaly detection problem, the algorithms are trained solely based on tamper-attack-free measurements, while operating in general scenarios that may include physical tamper attacks. Two major challenges in the algorithm design are environmental changes, e.g., moving persons, that are not due to an attack and evaluating the trade-off between detection performance and complexity. Our experimental results from two different environments, comprising an office and a hall, show the proper detection performances of the proposed methods with different complexity levels. The optimal proposed method achieves a 93.32% true positive rate and a 10% false positive rate with a suitable level of complexity.

Keywords: CSI; OFDM; anomaly detection; deep learning; physical tamper attack.

Grants and funding

This work has been supported in part by the “University SAL Labs” initiative of Silicon Austria Labs (SAL) and its Austrian partner universities for applied fundamental research for electronic based systems and by the InSecTT project, Johannes Kepler University, and the COMET-K2 “Center for Symbiotic Mechatronics” of the Linz Center of Mechatronics (LCM) funded by the Austrian federal government and the federal state of Upper Austria. InSecTT received funding from the Electronic Component Systems for European Leadership Joint Undertaking under Grant Agreement No. 876038. The document reflects only the authors’ views, and the Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. This Joint Undertaking receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme and Austria, Spain, Finland, Ireland, Sweden, Germany, Poland, Portugal, Netherlands, Belgium, and Norway.