Abstract
Instrumentation systems are essential in many critical applications such as air defense and natural disaster prediction and control. In these systems, the Quality-of-Service, measurement capacity, resilience, and efficiency are higher than in traditional monolithic instruments, thus ultra-reliable low latency, broadband, and massive communications are required to communicate all those machines. In such scenario, 5G communication technologies are seen as a promising solution. To achieve that, 5G networks provide a new radio interface in which hundreds of antennas are used to serve around tens of users in each frequency slot. This approach is only feasible if all those antennas are controlled by a hybrid transmission and reception chain, where radio beams are conformed. However, this approach opens the door to innovative cyber-physical attacks. For instance, digital and analog beamforming algorithms may be poisoned to spread the energy in the free space, deny the 5G communication services, and use that as a vector to attack and degrade the instrumentation systems. In this paper, we describe a new method for poisoning 5G beamforming algorithms based on passive radio-obstacles. Our mathematical framework allows an attacker to manage an obstacle made of unit cells of absorbent materials and varactors, so it can mix and reflect MIMO radio signals in such a way beamforming algorithms get confused and spread all the energy into free space. To validate the proposed approach, a simulation scenario was built, where different beamforming algorithms were considered. Results show the proposed attack is successful with all kinds of hybrid and analog beamforming algorithms, so more than 90% of the available power is spread in the free space and Quality-of-Service of instrumentation systems is degraded around 77%.
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Acknowledgments
This publication was produced within the framework of Ramón Alcarria and Borja Bordel's research projects on the occasion of their stay at Argonne National Laboratory (José Castillejo’s 2021 grant). This work is supported by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities through the COGNOS project (PID2019-105484RB-I00).
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Bordel, B., Alcarria, R., Chung, J., Kettimuthu, R., Robles, T., Armuelles, I. (2023). Quality-of-Service Degradation in Distributed Instrumentation Systems Through Poisoning of 5G Beamforming Algorithms. In: You, I., Youn, TY. (eds) Information Security Applications. WISA 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13720. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25659-2_5
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