Multiple Cooperative Attackers for Tag-Based Physical Layer Authentication

Abstract

This article concerns the problem of ensuring the security of the tag-based Physical-Layer Authentication (PLA) schemes under multiple cooperative attackers. This problem is important and challenging because of the following reasons. First, if more attackers launch a cooperative attack, the success probability of launching an eavesdropping attack will be improved. Second, based on a cooperative communication system, cooperative attackers can launch more advanced attacks, e.g., a cooperative attack that traps the legitimate user to re-transmit the same tag again. Thus, it is challenging and desirable to construct a secure tag-based PLA scheme under multiple cooperative attackers. For effectively defending against a cooperative attack under multiple cooperative attackers, we propose a new tag-based PLA scheme, referred to as the PLA with the Detection of a Cooperative Attack (PLA-DCA) scheme. The basic idea of the PLA-DCA scheme is to utilize the extra noise in a replayed signal, since a replayed signal inevitably changes the distribution property of receiver noise, e.g., increment of the noise variance. Then, we implemented the proposed scheme and conducted extensive performance comparisons to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed scheme. We evaluate the security of various schemes through equivocation, which represents the uncertainty of estimating a tag. From the simulation results, we verify that the proposed scheme provides higher security than the prior tag-based PLA schemes.