Innovative Attack Detection Solutions for Wireless Networks with Application to Location Security

Modern wireless communication networks are threatened by new generations of radio hackers. These are skilled attackers equipped with low-cost software radios, suitably instrumented so as to monitor, degrade, or even alter the radio signals. The aim of this paper is to devise innovative detection architectures against the most common classes of threats: broadband noise jammers, whose goal is to reduce the signal-to-noise ratio, and spoofing/meaconing attacks, which aim to inject false or incorrect information into the receiver. To this end, we resort to the hypothesis testing theory and solve the associated problems by means of the GLRT possibly accounting for penalty terms. The resulting decision schemes represent the main technical novelty of this work. The analysis of their performance focuses on a location security case study for 4G/5G cellular networks. To this end, we leverage measurement models from the cellular localization literature and generate data according to these models. The numerical results show the effectiveness of the proposed approaches in comparison with suitable counterparts.