Using the physical layer for wireless authentication in time-variant channels

By Liang Xiao, Larry J. Greenstein, Narayan B. Mandayam, Wade Trappe. IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 2008

393 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The wireless medium contains domain-specific information that can be used to complement and enhance traditional security mechanisms. In this paper we propose ways to exploit the spatial variability of the radio channel response in a rich scattering environment, as is typical of indoor environments. Specifically, we describe a physical-layer authentication algorithm that utilizes channel probing and hypothesis testing to determine whether current and prior communication attempts are made by the same transmit terminal. In this way, legitimate users can be reliably authenticated and false users can be reliably detected. We analyze the ability of a receiver to discriminate between transmitters (users) according to their channel frequency responses. This work is based on a generalized channel response with both spatial and temporal variability, and considers correlations among the time, frequency and spatial domains. Simulation results, using the ray-tracing tool WiSE to generate the time-averaged response, verify the efficacy of the approach under realistic channel conditions, as well as its capability to work under unknown channel variations.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a246ed09ba270853be35430d23337ab640afaa9c

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Aerospace Engineering

1. Zhu Han
2. Walid Saad
3. Wade Trappe
4. Rong Zheng
5. Qiang Xu
6. Rui Zhang
7. Medhi Bennis
8. Merouane Debbah

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. Walid Saad
2. Zhu Han
3. Hsiao-Hwa Chen
4. Narayan B. Mandayam
5. Wade Trappe
6. Rong Zheng
7. Yiliang Liu
8. Qiang Xu

Citations in the corpus

• Information-Theoretically Secret Key Generation for Fading Wireless Channels (2009, background): “Implicitly, we assume that the adversary is not engaging in an active attack against the probing process, though we note that physical layer authentication techniques, such as presented in [60] might be applicable in such an adversarial setting.”
• Physical Layer Security for Next Generation Wireless Networks: Theories, Technologies, and Challenges (2017, background): “From the analysis in [129], the assumption does not hold in general, since the”
• Device Fingerprinting in Wireless Networks: Challenges and Opportunities (2015, background): “In [27], [28], the time-varying channel was considered”
• Security and Privacy for 6G: A Survey on Prospective Technologies and Challenges (2021, background): “The authors of [138] found that low SNR (e.”