GALAMC: Guaranteed Authentication Level at Minimized Complexity Relying on Intelligent Collaboration

Abstract

Conventional centralized authentication techniques based on both digital cryptography and physical-layer attributes are prone to single-point failure due to either compromised digital security keys or an abrupt change in the physical communication environment. Although these particular challenges could be mitigated by the joint use of decentralized authentication and physical-layer attributes, such schemes often exhibit unpredictable performance. Simultaneously, the necessary involvement of multiple parties and the imperfect observation of the physical communication environment can also significantly increase the latency and computational complexity. As a remedy, a decentralized authentication scheme is proposed in this paper to achieve <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Guaranteed Authentication Level at Minimized Complexity</i> (GALAMC) based on the intelligent use of distributed collaboration and available distributive physical-layer attributes. Specifically, we aim for minimizing the complexity of the proposed collaborative authentication process by harnessing the minimum number of collaborative nodes and the selected authentication attributes at each node across the different environments while guaranteeing the required authentication level. The related physical-layer authentication scheme is implemented at each collaborative node where different physical-layer attributes can be selected based on their usefulness which is time-varying. The simulation results demonstrate that our scheme maintains the target level of authentication and it is more immune to sudden environmental changes than the conventional centralized physical-layer authentication scheme. It can also be observed that our proposed scheme can adaptively select the minimum number of collaborative nodes for adaptively minimizing the computational cost.