Physical Layer Authentication in Mission-Critical MTC Networks: A Security and Delay Performance Analysis

TL;DR

This paper analyzes a physical layer authentication protocol in mission-critical MTC networks, focusing on its detection performance and delay impacts, and derives bounds to assess its viability under various attack strategies.

Contribution

It provides the first analytical delay performance bounds for PLA in mission-critical MTC, considering different adversary strategies and channel conditions.

Findings

PLA effectively detects impersonation attacks.

Sufficient antennas and LOS improve PLA performance.

PLA reduces delay impacts of disassociation and Sybil attacks.

Abstract

We study the detection and delay performance impacts of a feature-based physical layer authentication (PLA) protocol in mission-critical machine-type communication (MTC) networks. The PLA protocol uses generalized likelihood-ratio testing based on the line-of-sight (LOS), single-input multiple-output channel-state information in order to mitigate impersonation attempts from an adversary node. We study the detection performance, develop a queueing model that captures the delay impacts of erroneous decisions in the PLA (i.e., the false alarms and missed detections), and model three different adversary strategies: data injection, disassociation, and Sybil attacks. Our main contribution is the derivation of analytical delay performance bounds that allow us to quantify the delay introduced by PLA that potentially can degrade the performance in mission-critical MTC networks. For the delay analysis, we utilize tools from stochastic network calculus. Our results show that with a sufficient number of receive antennas (approx. 4-8) and sufficiently strong LOS components from legitimate devices, PLA is a viable option for securing mission-critical MTC systems, despite the low latency requirements associated to corresponding use cases. Furthermore, we find that PLA can be very effective in detecting the considered attacks, and in particular, it can significantly reduce the delay impacts of disassociation and Sybil attacks.