In this thesis, we focus on vulnerabilities and robustness of two wireless communication technologies: global navigation satellite system (GNSS), a technology that provides position-velocity-time information, and massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO), a core cellular 5G technology. In particular, we investigate spoofing and jamming attacks to GNSS and massive MIMO, respectively, and the robust massive MIMO receiver against impulsive noises. In this context, spoofing refers to the situation in which a receiver identifies falsified signals, that are transmitted by the spoofers, as legitimate or trustable signals.

Jamming, on the other hand, refers to the transmission of radio signals that disrupt communications by decreasing the signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) on the receiver side.

The reason why we investigate impulsive noises is that the standard wireless receivers assume that the noise has Gaussian distribution. However, the impulsive noises may appear in any communication link. The difference between impulsive noises and standard Gaussian noises is that it is more likely to observe outliers in impulsive noises. Therefore, we question whether the standard Gaussian receivers are robust against impulsive noises and design robust receivers against impulsive noises.

More specifically, in paper A we analyze the effects of distributed jammers on massive MIMO and answer the following questions: Is massive MIMO more robust to distributed jammers compared with previous generation's cellular networks? Which jamming attack strategies are the best from the jammer's perspective, and can the jamming power be spread over space to achieve more harmful attacks?

In paper B, we propose a detector for GNSS receivers that is able to detect multiple spoofers without having any prior information about the attack strategy or the number of spoofers in the environment.

In paper C and D, we design robust receivers for massive MIMO against impulsive noise. In paper C, we model the noise having a Cauchy distribution and present a channel estimation technique, achievable rates and soft-decision metrics for coded signals. The main observation in paper C is that the proposed receiver works well in the presence of Cauchy and Gaussian noises, although the standard Gaussian receiver performs very bad when the noise has Cauchy distribution. In paper D, we compare two types of receivers, the Gaussian-mixture and the Cauchy-based, when the noise has symmetric alpha-stable (SαS) distributions. Based on the numerical results, the Gaussian-mixture receiver outperforms the Cauchy-based receiver.

In this paper, we work on channel estimationtechniques for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) with Cauchy noise. In the standard massive MIMO setup, the users transmit orthonormal pilots during the training phase and the received signal in the base station is projected onto each orthonormal pilot signal. This process is optimum when the noise is Gaussian. In other words, the obtained signal after this processis the sufficient statistic and we do not lose any information. We show that this process is not optimum when the noise is Cauchy. Hence, we propose a channel estimation technique forthe unprocessed received signal. The proposed channel estimation technique is compared with the channel estimates that are obtained from the projected signal.

In this paper, we evaluate the uplink spectral efficiency (SE) of a single-cell massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system with distributed jammers. We define four different attack scenarios and compare their impact on the massive MIMO system as well as on a conventional single-input-multiple-output (SIMO) system. More specifically, the jammers attack the base station (BS) during both the uplink training phase and data phase. The BS uses either least squares (LS) or linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) estimators for channel estimation and utilizes either maximum-ratio-combining (MRC) or zero-forcing (ZF) decoding vectors. We show that ZF gives higher SE than MRC but, interestingly, the performance is unaffected by the choice of the estimators. The simulation results show that the performance loss percentage of massive MIMO is less than that of the SIMO system. Moreover, we consider two types of power control algorithms: jamming-aware and jamming-ignorant. In both cases, we consider the max-min and proportional fairness criteria to increase the uplink SE of massive MIMO systems. We notice numerically that max-min fairness is not a good option because if one user is strongly affected by the jamming, it will degrade the other users’ SE as well. On the other hand, proportional fairness improves the sum SE of the system compared with the full power transmission scenario.

Wireless communication technology has evolved rapidly during the last 20 years. Nowadays, there are huge networks providing communication infrastructures to not only people but also to machines, such as unmanned air and ground vehicles, cars, household appliances and so on. There is no doubt that new wireless communication technologies must be developed, that support the data traffic in these emerging, large networks. While developing these technologies, it is also important to investigate the vulnerability of these technologies to different malicious attacks. In particular, spoofing and jamming attacks should be investigated and new countermeasure techniques should be developed. In this context, spoofing refers to the situation in which a receiver identifies falsified signals, that are transmitted by the spoofers, as legitimate or trustable signals. Jamming, on the other hand, refers to the transmission of radio signals that disrupt communications by decreasing the signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) on the receiver side. 

In this thesis, we analyze the effects of spoofing and jamming both on global navigation satellite system (GNSS) and on massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communications. GNSS is everywhere and used to provide location information. Massive MIMO is one of the cornerstone technologies in 5G. We also propose countermeasure techniques to the studied spoofing and jamming attacks. 

More specifically, in paper A we analyze the effects of distributed jammers on massive MIMO and answer the following questions: Is massive MIMO more robust to distributed jammers compared with previous generation’s cellular networks? Which jamming attack strategies are the best from the jammer’s perspective, and can the jamming power be spread over space to achieve more harmful attacks? In paper B, we propose a detector for GNSS receivers that is able to detect multiple spoofers without having any prior information about the attack strategy or the number of spoofers in the environment. 

We consider Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) spoofing attacks and devise a countermeasure appropriate for mobile GNSS receivers. Our approach is to design detectors that, operating after the signal acquisition, enable the victim receiver to determine with high probability whether it is under a spoofing attack. Namely, the binary hypothesis is that either the GNSS receiver tracks legitimate satellite signals, ℋ 0 , or spoofed signals, ℋ 1 . We estimate power and angle of arrival (AOA) of received signals. A key assumption on the attacker sophistication: Spoofed signals come from one signal source, typically the attacker radio, instead of multiple sources, the satellites, for legitimate signals. We analyze and compare the detectors performance and we derive some lower bounds on the estimation quality for unknown parameters. Based on the simulation results, the detectors can operate on low SNR that is applicable for GNSS.