Unconditional Authentication Based on Physical Layer Offered Chain Key in Wireless Communication

Area of Science:

• Wireless Communication Security
• Information Theory
• Cryptography

Background:

• Wireless communication faces impersonation and substitution attacks due to vulnerable air interfaces.
• Existing authentication methods (cryptography-based, physical layer fingerprint-based) are vulnerable to infinite computing power attackers.
• Data integrity is not well protected by current physical layer fingerprinting methods.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a wireless unconditional authentication framework resistant to infinite computing power attackers.
• To propose and analyze the performance of a novel authentication framework.
• To provide a new perspective for securing wireless communications.

Main Methods:

• Proposed a physical layer offered chain key (PHYLOCK) structure for generating one-time keys.
• Generated one-time keys by XORing physical layer updated keys from channel state information (CSI) and previous chain keys.
• Analyzed security using information theory and derived the boundary of deception probability.

Main Results:

• Achieved a probability of deception of 2^-12Hk, where Hk is the entropy of the one-time key.
• Established conditions for unconditional authentication.
• Demonstrated that key and authentication code lengths must be twice the message length.

Conclusions:

• The proposed unconditional authentication framework offers a new method to resist infinite computing power attackers.
• PHYLOCK structure effectively provides one-time keys for unconditional authentication.
• Specific conditions on key length, authentication code length, and encoding rules are necessary for unconditional authentication.