Channel Impulse Response-based Physical Layer Authentication in a Diffusion-based Molecular Communication System
This addresses security for nano-scale communication systems, but it is incremental as it applies an existing authentication concept to a new domain.
The paper tackles impersonation attacks in diffusion-based molecular communication by using the 3D channel impulse response as a device fingerprint for authentication, with simulation results showing a trade-off between minimizing false acceptance and false rejection error probabilities.
Consider impersonation attack by an active malicious nano node (Eve) on a diffusion based molecular communication (DbMC) system---Eve transmits during the idle slots to deceive the nano receiver (Bob) that she is indeed the legitimate nano transmitter (Alice). To this end, this work exploits the 3-dimensional (3D) channel impulse response (CIR) with $L$ taps as device fingerprint for authentication of the nano transmitter during each slot. Specifically, Bob utilizes the Alice's CIR as ground truth to construct a binary hypothesis test to systematically accept/reject the data received in each slot. Simulation results highlight the great challenge posed by impersonation attack--i.e., it is not possible to simultaneously minimize the two error probabilities. In other words, one needs to tolerate on one error type in order to minimize the other error type.