In 5G networks, the Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN) is considered a promising future architecture in terms of minimizing energy consumption and allocating resources efficiently by providing real-time cloud infrastructures, cooperative radio, and centralized data processing. Recently, given their vulnerability to malicious attacks, the security of C-RAN networks has attracted significant attention. Among various anomaly-based intrusion detection techniques, the most promising one is the machine learning-based intrusion detection as it learns without human assistance and adjusts actions accordingly. In this direction, many solutions have been proposed, but they show either low accuracy in terms of attack classification or they offer just a single layer of attack detection. This research focuses on deploying a multi-stage machine learning-based intrusion detection (ML-IDS) in 5G C-RAN that can detect and classify four types of jamming attacks: constant jamming, random jamming, deceptive jamming, and reactive jamming. This deployment enhances security by minimizing the false negatives in C-RAN architectures. The experimental evaluation of the proposed solution is carried out using WSN-DS (Wireless Sensor Networks DataSet), which is a dedicated wireless dataset for intrusion detection. The final classification accuracy of attacks is 94.51\% with a 7.84\% false negative rate.
Intentional interference constitutes a major threat for communication networks operating over a shared medium where availability is imperative. Jamming attacks are often simple and cheap to implement. In particular, today's jammers can perform physical carrier sensing in order to disrupt communication more efficiently, specially in a network of simple wireless devices such as sensor nodes, which usually operate over a single frequency (or a limited frequency band) and which cannot benefit from the use of spread spectrum or other more advanced technologies. This article proposes the medium acce…
Energy, water, health, transportation and emergency services act as backbones for our society. Aiming at high degrees of efficiency, these systems are increasingly automated, depending on communication systems. However, this makes these Critical Infrastructures (CI) prone to cyber attacks, resulting in data leaks, reduced performance or even total system failure. Beyond a survey of existing vulnerabilities, we provide an experimental evaluation of targeted uplink jamming against LTE's air interface. Primarily, our implementations of smart attacks on the LTE Physical Uplink Control Channel (PUC…
Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工大学）；Intelligent Automation, Inc.（智能自动化公司）
An adversarial machine learning approach is introduced to launch jamming attacks on wireless communications and a defense strategy is presented. A cognitive transmitter uses a pre-trained classifier to predict the current channel status based on recent sensing results and decides whether to transmit or not, whereas a jammer collects channel status and ACKs to build a deep learning classifier that reliably predicts the next successful transmissions and effectively jams them. This jamming approach is shown to reduce the transmitter's performance much more severely compared with random or sensing…
In this paper, reinforcement learning (RL) for network slicing is considered in NextG radio access networks, where the base station (gNodeB) allocates resource blocks (RBs) to the requests of user equipments and aims to maximize the total reward of accepted requests over time. Based on adversarial machine learning, a novel over-the-air attack is introduced to manipulate the RL algorithm and disrupt NextG network slicing. The adversary observes the spectrum and builds its own RL based surrogate model that selects which RBs to jam subject to an energy budget with the objective of maximizing the …
The broadcasting nature of the wireless medium makes exposure to eavesdroppers a potential threat. Physical Layer Security (PLS) has been widely recognized as a promising security measure complementary to encryption. It has recently been demonstrated that PLS can be implemented using off-the-shelf equipment by spectrum-programming enhanced Software-Defined Networking (SDN), where a network controller is able to execute intelligent access point (AP) selection algorithms such that PLS can be achieved and secrecy capacity optimized. In this paper, we provide a basic system model for such implemen…
In a number of practical scenarios a wireless device needs to mark its presence, for instance, to some access point. That enables the access point to assign the device its transmission slot or update the count of the network nodes. Many protocols can achieve exactly this result. In this paper, our goal is to show how that can be done in the simplest messaging model, the so-called beeping model. Consequently, we constrain our design so that the station does not send any modulated information in the signal and the receiver actually does not need to demodulate/decode it. We are interested in send…
A natural basis for the detection of a wireless random reactive jammer (RRJ) is the perceived violation by the detector (typically located at the access point (AP)) of the carrier sensing protocol underpinning many wireless random access protocols (e.g., WiFi). Specifically, when the wireless medium is perceived by a station to be busy, a carrier sensing compliant station will avoid transmission while a RRJ station will often initiate transmission. However, hidden terminals (HTs), i.e., activity detected by the AP but not by the sensing station, complicate the use of carrier sensing as the bas…
We consider opportunistic communications over multiple channels where the state ("good" or "bad") of each channel evolves as independent and identically distributed Markov processes. A user, with limited sensing and access capability, chooses one channel to sense and subsequently access (based on the sensed channel state) in each time slot. A reward is obtained when the user senses and accesses a "good" channel. The objective is to design the optimal channel selection policy that maximizes the expected reward accrued over time. This problem can be generally cast as a Partially Observable Marko…
Cognitive (Radio) (CR) Communications (CC) are mainly deployed within the environments of primary (user) communications, where the channel states and accessibility are usually stochastically distributed (benign or IID). However, many practical CC are also exposed to disturbing events (contaminated) and vulnerable jamming attacks (adversarial or non-IID). Thus, the channel state distribution of spectrum could be stochastic, contaminated or adversarial at different temporal and spatial locations. Without any a priori, facilitating optimal CC is a very challenging issue. In this paper, we propose…
We consider a multi-channel opportunistic communication system where the states of these channels evolve as independent and statistically identical Markov chains (the Gilbert-Elliot channel model). A user chooses one channel to sense and access in each slot and collects a reward determined by the state of the chosen channel. The problem is to design a sensing policy for channel selection to maximize the average reward, which can be formulated as a multi-arm restless bandit process. In this paper, we study the structure, optimality, and performance of the myopic sensing policy. We show that the…
In this paper, we study jamming attacks against wireless networks. Specifically, we consider a network of base stations (BS) or access points (AP) and investigate the impact of a fixed number of jammers that are randomly deployed according to a Binomial point process. We shed light on the network performance in terms of a) the outage probability and b) the error probability of a victim receiver in the downlink of this wireless network. We derive analytical expressions for both these metrics and discuss in detail how the jammer network must adapt to the various wireless network parameters in or…
Because of the open access nature of wireless communications, wireless networks can suffer from malicious activity, such as jamming attacks, aimed at undermining the network's ability to sustain communication links and acceptable throughput. One important consideration when designing networks is to appropriately tune the network topology and its connectivity so as to support the communication needs of those participating in the network. This paper examines the problem of interference attacks that are intended to harm connectivity and throughput, and illustrates the method of mapping network pe…
Underutilized wireless channel is a waste of spectral resource. Eavesdropping compromises data secrecy. How to overcome the two problems with one solution? In this paper, we propose a spectrum sharing model that defends against eavesdropping. Consider a source-destination channel that is being eavesdropped. Cognitive radio can help jamming the eavesdropper. Friendly jamming is a physical layer security method of protecting data secrecy based on radio propagation characteristic. In return, the helper is allowed to access the unused channel of the source. The desirable characteristic of cognitiv…
Designing efficient channel access schemes for wireless communications without any prior knowledge about the nature of environments has been a very challenging issue, especially when the channel states distribution of all spectrum resources could be entirely or partially stochastic and/or adversarial at different time and locations. In this paper, we propose an adaptive channel access algorithm for wireless communications in unknown environments based on the theory of multi-armed bandits (MAB) problems. By automatically tuning two control parameters, i.e., learning rate and exploration probabi…
The throughput efficiency of a wireless mesh network with potentially malicious external or internal interference can be significantly improved by equipping routers with multi-radio access over multiple channels. For reliably mitigating the effect of interference, frequency diversity (e.g., channel hopping) and time diversity (e.g., carrier sense multiple access) are conventionally leveraged to schedule communication channels. However, multi-radio scheduling over a limited set of channels to minimize the effect of interference and maximize network performance in the presence of concurrent netw…
The challenge of designing an efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol and analyzing it has been an important research topic for over 30 years. This paper focuses on the performance analysis (through simulation) and modification of a well known MAC protocol CSMA/CD. The existing protocol does not consider the wastage of bandwidth due to unutilized periods of the channel. By considering this fact, performance of MAC protocol can be enhanced. The purpose of this work is to modify the existing protocol by enabling it to adapt according to state of the network. The modified protocol takes ap…
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；Intelligent Automation, Inc.（智能自动化公司）
Deep learning provides powerful means to learn from spectrum data and solve complex tasks in 5G and beyond such as beam selection for initial access (IA) in mmWave communications. To establish the IA between the base station (e.g., gNodeB) and user equipment (UE) for directional transmissions, a deep neural network (DNN) can predict the beam that is best slanted to each UE by using the received signal strengths (RSSs) from a subset of possible narrow beams. While improving the latency and reliability of beam selection compared to the conventional IA that sweeps all beams, the DNN itself is sus…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are emerging as enablers for supporting many applications and services, such as precision agriculture, search and rescue, temporary network deployment or coverage extension, and security. UAVs are being considered for integration into emerging 5G networks as aerial users or network support nodes. We propose to leverage UAVs in 5G to assist in the prevention, detection, and recovery of attacks on 5G networks. Specifically, we consider jamming, spoofing, eavesdropping and the corresponding mitigation mechanisms that are enabled by the versatility of UAVs. We intro…
Machine learning finds rich applications in Internet of Things (IoT) networks such as information retrieval, traffic management, spectrum sensing, and signal authentication. While there is a surge of interest to understand the security issues of machine learning, their implications have not been understood yet for wireless applications such as those in IoT systems that are susceptible to various attacks due the open and broadcast nature of wireless communications. To support IoT systems with heterogeneous devices of different priorities, we present new techniques built upon adversarial machine…
