DoS Attack-Resilient Initial Access for mmWave/THz based NextG Communications

Principal Investigator:

Jacek Kibilda, research assistant professor, Virginia Tech, and CCI faculty

Co-Principal Investigators:

Vijay K. Shah, assistant professor, cybersecurity engineering, George Mason University

Kai Zeng, associate professor, electrical and computer engineering, George Mason University

Parth Pathak, assistant professor, computer science, George Mason University

DoS Attack-Resilient Initial Access for mmWave/THz based NextG Communications Project Description: 

Next generation wireless (NextG) communication radios operating on ultra-high frequency bands, such as millimeter-wave (mmWave) and terahertz (THz) spectrum, need to know the location of other radios in order to communicate with them. Beam sweeping methods, also known as initial access, are a popular solution but tend to be inefficient in how much time and spectrum resources they take away from fast networks. Worryingly, they could also be a security vulnerability. The team, composed of researchers from Virginia Tech and George Mason University, plans to study, understand, and model the fundamental vulnerability of beam sweeping methods to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks that introduce signal alterations intended to deny the accurate beam alignment between the transmitter-receiver pair. Researchers will explore applying machine learning methods to both understand the attacks and improve resilience. The team will showcase their research using four mmWave mast-head units on loan from InterDigital Inc. to the CCI xG Testbed at Virginia Tech.