Detecting Byzantine attacks without clean reference

Abstract

We consider an amplify-and-forward relay network composed of a source, two relays, and a destination. In this network, the two relays are untrusted in the sense that they may perform Byzantine attacks by forwarding altered symbols to the destination. Note that every symbol received by the destination may be altered, and hence no clean reference observation is available to the destination. For this type of networks, we identify what kind of Byzantine attacks can be detected in the physical-layer, and further investigate how the channel conditions impact the detection against the identified attacks. Firstly, we show that it is possible to handle a particular kind of Byzantine attacks, where one of the relays carries out an arbitrary attack that allows the stochastic distributions of altered symbols to vary arbitrarily and depend on each other, while the other relay’s hostile behavior embodies a certain stationary stochastic property. Then, we prove that if and only if the network satisfies a non-manipulability condition, such identified Byzantine attacks can be asymptotically detected by only using a sufficiently high number of channel observations. No pre-shared secret or secret transmission is needed for the detection of the identified attacks, which demonstrates the value of physical-layer security techniques for counteracting Byzantine attacks.

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