Location Consistency-Based MITM Attack Detection in 802.11ad Networks

IEEE 802.11ad-enabled millimeter-wave communication systems are becoming a key enabler for bandwidth-intensive and delay-sensitive indoor applications, due to their potentials to provision multiple-Gigabytes. However, the weak built-in security scheme renders them vulnerable to various cyber-physical attacks, such as beam-stealing and man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack. A MITM attacker aims to intercept a legitimate communication through deceiving the victims into steering their signals towards the attacker’s location. Then, the attacker pretends to be a relay between the victims and eavesdrop or even manipulate the relayed packets. Hence, it is crucial to detect the existence of MITM attacks in a timely manner and thus to restore network service. In this backdrop, a location consistency-based MITM detection scheme is put forward. For each transmitter in the network, it will check for the beamforming information table and location consistency of its neighbors after the beam training process. An attack will be declared if an inconsistency is found by a legitimate node in the network. To validate the effectiveness of the algorithms, a simulator is developed and a series of simulations are conducted. Results have shown that the proposed algorithms could effectively determine the existence of MITM attacks.