Collaborative non-cryptographic physical-layer authentication schemes in wireless networks
Journal
URSI Radio Science Bulletin
Journal Volume
2014
Journal Issue
349
Pages
18
Date Issued
2014-06
Author(s)
Abstract
Recently, many lower-layer characteristics, such as clock skew, channel response, and frame sequence number, have been utilized to achieve wireless security. The physical-layer characteristics of the wireless medium serve as a rich source of location-specific information that can be used to complement or enhance traditional security schemes. In this paper, we focus on the problem of physical-layer authentication (PHY authentication), which aims at assuring that the current transmission comes from the same entity as the previous transmission. In other words, the receiver analyzes the physical-layer characteristics to discriminate among different transmissions coming from different devices. Two physical-layer characteristics are considered separately: the frequency response of the wireless channel, and the propagation delay. Collaborative authentication is also treated in this paper. First, we consider collaborative authentication between different receivers observing the same physical-layer characteristic. We next combine the authentication results from different characteristics to formulate generalized multi-feature authentication. Although they are described under the discussion of physical-layer characteristics, it is possible to apply the proposed scheme to formulate a collaborative cross-layer non-cryptographic authentication mechanism with moderate modifications. Numerical results showed that the physical-layer authentication is valid, and the proposed collaborative authentication schemes further improved the authentication performance.
Subjects
Authentication , Collaboration , Communication system security , Wireless networks , Receivers , Ad hoc networks
Type
journal article