Exploiting Lack of Hardware Reciprocity for Sender-Node Authentication at the PHY Layer
This addresses security for wireless communication systems, but it is incremental as it builds on existing authentication frameworks with a new metric.
The paper tackles the problem of authenticating wireless senders at the physical layer by exploiting non-reciprocal hardware parameters, achieving a specific success rate for detecting intruders, as detailed in performance comparisons.
This paper proposes to exploit the so-called {\it reciprocity parameters} (modelling non-reciprocal communication hardware) to use them as decision metric for binary hypothesis testing based authentication framework at a receiver node Bob. Specifically, Bob first learns the reciprocity parameters of the legitimate sender Alice via initial training. Then, during the test phase, Bob first obtains a measurement of reciprocity parameters of channel occupier (Alice, or, the intruder Eve). Then, with ground truth and current measurement both in hand, Bob carries out the hypothesis testing to automatically accept (reject) the packets sent by Alice (Eve). For the proposed scheme, we provide its success rate (the detection probability of Eve), and its performance comparison with other schemes.