He Fang

He Fang, Angie Qi, Xianbin Wang

Security provisioning has become the most important design consideration for large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) systems due to their critical roles to support diverse vertical applications by connecting heterogenous devices, machines and industry processes. Conventional authentication and authorization schemes are insufficient in dealing the emerging IoT security challenges due to their reliance on both static digital mechanisms and computational complexity for improving security level. Furthermore, the isolated security designs for different layers and link segments while ignoring the overall protection lead to cascaded security risks as well as growing communication latency and overhead. In this article, we envision new artificial intelligence (AI) enabled security provisioning approaches to overcome these issues while achieving fast authentication and progressive authorization. To be more specific, a lightweight intelligent authentication approach is developed by exploring machine learning at the gateway to identify the access time slots or frequencies of resource-constraint devices. Then we propose a holistic authentication and authorization approach, where online machine learning and trust management are adopted for analyzing the complex dynamic environment and achieving adaptive access control. These new AI enabled approaches establish the connections between transceivers quickly and enhance security progressively, so that communication latency can be reduced and security risks are well-controlled in large-scale IoT. Finally, we outline several areas for AI-enabled security provisioning for future researches.

He Fang, Xianbin Wang, Stefano Tomasin

The fifth generation (5G) and beyond wireless networks are critical to support diverse vertical applications by connecting heterogeneous devices and machines, which directly increase vulnerability for various spoofing attacks. Conventional cryptographic and physical layer authentication techniques are facing some challenges in complex dynamic wireless environments, including significant security overhead, low reliability, as well as difficulty in pre-designing authentication model, providing continuous protections, and learning time-varying attributes. In this article, we envision new authentication approaches based on machine learning techniques by opportunistically leveraging physical layer attributes, and introduce intelligence to authentication for more efficient security provisioning. Machine learning paradigms for intelligent authentication design are presented, namely for parametric/non-parametric and supervised/unsupervised/reinforcement learning algorithms. In a nutshell, the machine learning-based intelligent authentication approaches utilize specific features in the multi-dimensional domain for achieving cost-effective, more reliable, model-free, continuous and situation-aware device validation under unknown network conditions and unpredictable dynamics.

He Fang, Xianbin Wang, Lajos Hanzo

Performance of the existing physical layer authentication schemes could be severely affected by the imperfect estimates and variations of the communication link attributes used. The commonly adopted static hypothesis testing for physical layer authentication faces significant challenges in time-varying communication channels due to the changing propagation and interference conditions, which are typically unknown at the design stage. To circumvent this impediment, we propose an adaptive physical layer authentication scheme based on machine-learning as an intelligent process to learn and utilize the complex and time-varying environment, and hence to improve the reliability and robustness of physical layer authentication. Explicitly, a physical layer attribute fusion model based on a kernel machine is designed for dealing with multiple attributes without requiring the knowledge of their statistical properties. By modeling the physical layer authentication as a linear system, the proposed technique directly reduces the authentication scope from a combined N-dimensional feature space to a single dimensional (scalar) space, hence leading to reduced authentication complexity. By formulating the learning (training) objective of the physical layer authentication as a convex problem, an adaptive algorithm based on kernel least-mean-square is then proposed as an intelligent process to learn and track the variations of multiple attributes, and therefore to enhance the authentication performance. Both the convergence and the authentication performance of the proposed intelligent authentication process are theoretically analyzed. Our simulations demonstrate that our solution significantly improves the authentication performance in time-varying environments.