A Channel Coding Approach for Physical-Layer Authentication

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel channel coding method for physical-layer authentication, enabling secure message verification with minimal bandwidth overhead by encoding authentication tags as part of the communication process.

Contribution

It proposes a new encoding-based framework for physical-layer authentication that leverages code ensembles and shared keys for enhanced security analysis.

Findings

Security can be analyzed via decoding techniques

Potential to achieve information-theoretic security

Method integrates authentication tags with message transmission

Abstract

For physical-layer authentication, the authentication tags are often sent concurrently with messages without much bandwidth expansion. In this paper, we present a channel coding approach for physical-layer authentication. The generation of authentication tags can be formulated as an encoding process for an ensemble of codes, where the shared key between Alice and Bob is considered as the input and the message is used to specify a code from the ensemble of codes. Then, we show that the security of physical-layer authentication schemes can be analyzed through decoding and physical-layer authentication schemes can potentially achieve both information-theoretic and computational securities.