Game theoretic study of protecting MIMO transmissions against smart attacks

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems are threatened by smart attackers, who apply programmable radio devices such as software defined radios to perform multiple types of attacks such as eavesdropping, jamming and spoofing. In this paper, MIMO transmission in the presence of smart attacks is formulated as a noncooperative game, in which a MIMO transmitter chooses its transmit power level and a smart attacker determines its attack type accordingly. A Nash equilibrium of this secure MIMO transmission game is derived and conditions assuring its existence are provided to reveal the impact of the number of antennas and the costs of the attacker to launch each type of attack. A power control strategy based on Q-learning is proposed for the MIMO transmitter to suppress the attack motivation of smart attackers in a dynamic version of MIMO transmission game without being aware of the attack and the radio channel model. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme can reduce the attack rate of smart attackers and improve the secrecy capacity compared with the benchmark strategy.