Multipath-Based Physical Layer Authentication for Dynamic Meta-Surface Antenna Systems

Wireless communications are vulnerable to attacks and jamming due to their broadcast nature, and establishing an authentication mechanism is one effective way to enhance security against malicious access. A physical layer authentication (PLA) scheme utilizing the multipath information is proposed in this paper. The atomic norm minimization algorithm and peak spectrum search algorithm are utilized to estimate the multipath information. By comparing the similarity of the multipath information in consecutive time slots, a binary hypothesis test is developed to verify the transmitter. Simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme can achieve a higher authentication probability.

I. Introduction

Wireless communications have many security vulnerabilities because of their open nature. Therefore, wireless systems need to establish a secure authentication mechanism to defend against security vulnerabilities. Physical layer authentication (PLA) as a new authentication mechanism has been widely attracted due to its low latency and low complexity. Notably, PLA schemes can be divided into two categories: active and passive schemes [1]. The active schemes indicate tag-based PLA approaches [2], [3]. The passive schemes include device-based PLA [4], [5] and channel-based PLA schemes [6]–[12].