2017/05/09 by Stefano Tomasin, Tomasin, Stefano
Engineering · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Information Theory (cs.IT) #Wireless Communication Security Techniques
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1705.03430
openalex publication_date 2017/05/09 · openalex created_date 2022/10/06 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
User authentication (UA) supports the receiver in deciding whether a message\ncomes from the claimed transmitter or from an impersonating attacker. In\ncryptographic approaches messages are signed with either an asymmetric or\nsymmetric key, and a source of randomness is required to generate the key. In\nphysical layer authentication (PLA) instead the receiver checks if received\nmessages presumably coming from the same source undergo the same channel. We\ncompare these solutions by considering the physical-layer channel features as\nrandomness source for generating the key, thus allowing an immediate comparison\nwith PLA (that already uses these features). For the symmetric-key approach we\nuse secret key agreement, while for asymmetric-key the channel is used as\nentropy source at the transmitter. We focus on the asymptotic case of an\ninfinite number of independent and identically distributed channel\nrealizations, showing the correctness of all schemes and analyzing the secure\nauthentication rate, that dictates the rate at which the probability that UA\nsecurity is broken goes to zero as the number of used channel resources (to\ngenerate the key or for PLA) goes to infinity. Both passive and active attacks\nare considered and by numerical results we compare the various systems.\n