Multi-factor Physical Layer Security Authentication in Short Blocklength Communication

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fast, multi-factor physical layer authentication protocol for short blocklength wireless communication, combining PUFs, proximity estimation, and secret key generation, with formal security proofs and performance evaluation.

Contribution

It proposes a novel multi-factor authentication scheme tailored for delay-constrained applications, integrating PUFs, proximity, and SKG with formal security validation.

Findings

The SKG scheme performs well with short blocklengths (n=512, 1024).

The protocol achieves secure fast re-authentication with zero round-trip time.

Formal proofs confirm the protocol's security under BAN, MB logic, and Tamarin-prover.

Abstract

Lightweight and low latency security schemes at the physical layer that have recently attracted a lot of attention include: (i) physical unclonable functions (PUFs), (ii) localization based authentication, and, (iii) secret key generation (SKG) from wireless fading coefficients. In this paper, we focus on short blocklengths and propose a fast, privacy preserving, multi-factor authentication protocol that uniquely combines PUFs, proximity estimation and SKG. We focus on delay constrained applications and demonstrate the performance of the SKG scheme in the short blocklength by providing a numerical comparison of three families of channel codes, including half rate low density parity check codes (LDPC), Bose Chaudhuri Hocquenghem (BCH), and, Polar Slepian Wolf codes for n=512, 1024. The SKG keys are incorporated in a zero-round-trip-time resumption protocol for fast re-authentication. All schemes of the proposed mutual authentication protocol are shown to be secure through formal proofs using Burrows, Abadi and Needham (BAN) and Mao and Boyd (MB) logic as well as the Tamarin-prover.