Methods for power line communication carrier equipment identity authentication and wiretapping equipment locating considering physical layer characteristics

Abstract

Power line communication (PLC) faces a wide range of illegal device access, wiretapping and data tampering. To ensure the confidentiality and integrity of data information, protection technologies based on data encryption and identity authentication are widely used. As one of the defense methods against wiretapping attacks, this paper takes into account the characteristics of the physical layer channel, and proposes a method for locating PLC wire-tapping equipment. First, the physical layer channel characteristics are extracted based on the communication protocol as the device fingerprint. Then the collected fingerprints are compared with the fingerprint library for device identity authentication. And when the identity authentication fails, a branch location method for wiretapping devices based on fingerprint transfer vectors is further proposed. Finally, by modeling the PLC channel and simulating eavesdropping scenarios, it is verified that the proposed method has a high accuracy rate of wiretapping equipment locating.