Relay-Assisted Proactive Eavesdropping With Cooperative Jamming and Spoofing

In this paper, we consider a legitimate proactive eavesdropping scenario where a distant central monitor covertly wiretaps the communication between a pair of suspicious users via several multi-antenna full-duplex spoofing relays and a multi-antenna cooperative jammer. Assuming an adaptive transmission policy at the suspicious users, the spoofing relays not only intercept but also forward the manipulated information to control the data rate of the suspicious users in collaboration with the jammer. We provide a technique which jointly optimizes the receive combining vector at the central monitor, the precoders at the relays, and the transmit covariance matrix at the jammer for maximizing the eavesdropping rate. To reveal some fundamental properties of the optimal operation, we first study a single-relay system. It is shown that when the central monitor experiences a poor eavesdropping channel link, the spoofing relay and the jammer should transmit destructive signals and jamming signals, respectively. In this case, the suspicious users are forced to decrease their data rate, while the intercepted information can be successfully decoded by the central monitor. On the other hand, when the eavesdropping channel condition is favorable, the spoofing relay forwards constructive signals to further increase the data rate at the suspicious users in a way that more information can be intercepted from the suspicious users. We then formulate a general eavesdropping rate maximization problem for multiple relays and present a semi-definite relaxation approach. A low-complexity design is also proposed based on our analysis for the single-relay system. Simulation results verify the efficiency of the proposed solutions compared to other baseline schemes in various practical setups.