Physical-Layer Authentication Based on Channel Phase Responses for Multi-Carriers Transmission

Abstract

To defend against eavesdropping and spoofing attacks, the physical layer authentication (PLA) techniques utilize the unique attributes of channel or device for identifying attackers. Among these techniques, the PLA schemes based on channel phase responses use the secret key driven channel phase to authenticate the legitimate user, which have a better performance than the channel amplitude based schemes. However, the prior phase-based schemes only consider the perfect channel correlation coefficient between the two successive timeslots, which differs from the real scenarios. Meanwhile, the closed-form expressions of the theoretical analysis results are not comprehensive in the prior schemes, which are also not tight especially at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regions. In this paper, we propose a PLA scheme based on the channel phase response, aiming to offset the performance loss introduced by the channel correlation coefficient. Moreover, we derive the closed-form expressions of the theoretical analysis results, such as the mean value, the variance and the probability density functions (PDFs), which can be utilized to provide the closed-form threshold for making decision instead of a great ideal of testing. Then, the security analysis is provided to verify the resistance of the proposed scheme under the attacks. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the benchmarks and the proposed theoretical results match well with the simulated results even under low SNR regions.