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RIS-Assisted Wireless Link Signatures for Specific Emitter Identification

Ning Gao, Shuchen Meng, Cen Li, Shengguo Meng, Wankai Tang, Shi Jin, Michail Matthaiou

TL;DR

This work tackles secure access in dense IoT and 6G by introducing a RIS-assisted PLA that allows a legitimate transmitter to shape channel fingerprints through RIS ON/OFF control. It develops a RSS-based spoofing detector, derives Gaussian RSS distributions under normal and attack conditions via the central limit theorem, and identifies an optimal detection threshold. The paper demonstrates theoretical feasibility, provides closed-form expressions for detection metrics, and validates the approach with a prototype showing notable improvements in detection performance, both when legitimate and attacker devices are at different locations and when they share locations. The findings reveal that RIS can enhance SEI by enlarging the RSS discriminability without adding noise, addressing a long-standing challenge in channel-fingerprint based SEI and enabling scalable, secure access in future RIS-enabled networks.

Abstract

The physical layer authentication (PLA) is a promising technology which can enhance the access security of a massive number of devices in the near future. In this paper, we propose a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted PLA system, in which the legitimate transmitter can customize the channel fingerprints during PLA by controlling the ON-OFF state of the RIS. Without loss of generality, we use the received signal strength (RSS) based spoofing detection approach to analyze the feasibility of the proposed architecture. Specifically, based on the RSS, we derive the statistical properties of PLA and give some interesting insights, which showcase that the RIS-assisted PLA is theoretically feasible. Then, we derive the optimal detection threshold to maximize the performance in the context of the presented performance metrics. Next, the actual feasibility of the proposed system is verified via proof-of-concept experiments on a RIS-assisted PLA prototype platform. The experiment results show that there are 3.5% and 76% performance improvements when the transmission sources are at different locations and at the same location, respectively.

RIS-Assisted Wireless Link Signatures for Specific Emitter Identification

TL;DR

This work tackles secure access in dense IoT and 6G by introducing a RIS-assisted PLA that allows a legitimate transmitter to shape channel fingerprints through RIS ON/OFF control. It develops a RSS-based spoofing detector, derives Gaussian RSS distributions under normal and attack conditions via the central limit theorem, and identifies an optimal detection threshold. The paper demonstrates theoretical feasibility, provides closed-form expressions for detection metrics, and validates the approach with a prototype showing notable improvements in detection performance, both when legitimate and attacker devices are at different locations and when they share locations. The findings reveal that RIS can enhance SEI by enlarging the RSS discriminability without adding noise, addressing a long-standing challenge in channel-fingerprint based SEI and enabling scalable, secure access in future RIS-enabled networks.

Abstract

The physical layer authentication (PLA) is a promising technology which can enhance the access security of a massive number of devices in the near future. In this paper, we propose a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted PLA system, in which the legitimate transmitter can customize the channel fingerprints during PLA by controlling the ON-OFF state of the RIS. Without loss of generality, we use the received signal strength (RSS) based spoofing detection approach to analyze the feasibility of the proposed architecture. Specifically, based on the RSS, we derive the statistical properties of PLA and give some interesting insights, which showcase that the RIS-assisted PLA is theoretically feasible. Then, we derive the optimal detection threshold to maximize the performance in the context of the presented performance metrics. Next, the actual feasibility of the proposed system is verified via proof-of-concept experiments on a RIS-assisted PLA prototype platform. The experiment results show that there are 3.5% and 76% performance improvements when the transmission sources are at different locations and at the same location, respectively.
Paper Structure (15 sections, 4 theorems, 23 equations, 3 figures)

This paper contains 15 sections, 4 theorems, 23 equations, 3 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Motivation and Contributions
  3. Notations
  4. system model and problem formulation
  5. Channel Model
  6. Spoofing Detection Formulation
  7. Theoretical Analysis of Spoofing Detection
  8. Test Statistics for Spoofing Detection
  9. Metrics
  10. Experimental Results
  11. Experimental Setup
  12. Performance Analysis
  13. Conclusion
  14. Proof of Proposition 1
  15. Proof of Proposition 3

Key Result

Lemma 1

Suppose that the equivalent channel of the $k$th subcarrier from Alice to Bob is then, the mean and the variance of the equivalent channel $h_{ARB}$ is zero and $\sum_{n=1}^N\alpha^2_ne^{j2\theta_n}\sigma^2_{RB}\sigma^2_{AR}+\sigma^2_A$, respectively.

Figures (3)

  • Figure 1: The schematic diagram of the developed RIS-assisted SEI platform.
  • Figure 2: The various statistical distributions of different transmission sources.
  • Figure 3: The ROC curves of the proposed RIS-assisted SEI system and the traditional SEI system with different locations of Eve.

Theorems & Definitions (5)

  • Lemma 1
  • Proposition 1
  • Proposition 2
  • Remark
  • Proposition 3