Blind Physical-Layer Authentication Based on Composite Radio Sample Characteristics

The promising physical-layer authentication (PLA) scheme enjoys low computational complexity and provides a lightweight solution for the wireless transmission security problem. However, the ideal but impractical assumptions are made on the priori knowledge in the traditional PLA schemes, which fail because the priori knowledge can be interfered by the impersonation attacks. Hence, a blind PLA scheme featured by the composite radio sample characteristics, active monitoring slots, and blind hypotheses tests is proposed in this paper. In particular, the intrinsic location-specific channel response integrated with the transmitter-specific signal knowledge is sampled during the active monitoring slots and is used to conduct minimum error (ME) and Neyman-Pearson (NP) hypothesis tests. The authentication reliability is enhanced significantly by jointly using the ME and NP criteria. For both the stationary and the non-stationary signal cases, our theoretical analysis shows that the temporal channel variations, the spatial channel correlations and the spectral bandwidth contribute to improve the authentication reliability. Our simulation results not only demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed PLA scheme, but also indicate the possible scenarios in which ME outperforms NP, and NP outperforms ME.