Active Eavesdropping via Spoofing Relay Attack

Abstract: This paper studies a new active eavesdropping technique via the so-called spoofing relay attack, which could be launched by the eavesdropper to significantly enhance the information leakage rate from the source over conventional passive eaves-dropping. With this attack, the eavesdropper acts as a relay to spoof the source to vary transmission rate in favor of its eavesdropping performance by either enhancing or degrading the effective channel of the legitimate link. The maxi-mum information leakage rate achievable by the eavesdropper and the corresponding optimal operation at the spoofing relay are obtained. It is shown that such a spoofing relay attack could impose new challenges from a physical-layer security perspective since it leads to significantly higher information leakage rate than conventional passive eavesdropping.