RIS-Assisted Wireless Link Signatures for Specific Emitter Identification

TL;DR

This paper introduces a RIS-assisted physical layer authentication system that enhances device identification security by controlling channel fingerprints, with theoretical analysis and experimental validation showing significant performance improvements.

Contribution

It proposes a novel RIS-assisted PLA system that enables customizable channel fingerprints and provides a comprehensive analysis and experimental validation of its effectiveness.

Findings

RIS-assisted PLA is theoretically feasible.

Performance improvements of 3.5% and 76% demonstrated.

Optimal detection threshold derived for enhanced security.

Abstract

The physical layer authentication (PLA) is a promising technology which can enhance the access security of a massive number of devices in the near future. In this paper, we propose a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted PLA system, in which the legitimate transmitter can customize the channel fingerprints during PLA by controlling the ON-OFF state of the RIS. Without loss of generality, we use the received signal strength (RSS) based spoofing detection approach to analyze the feasibility of the proposed architecture. Specifically, based on the RSS, we derive the statistical properties of PLA and give some interesting insights, which showcase that the RIS-assisted PLA is theoretically feasible. Then, we derive the optimal detection threshold to maximize the performance in the context of the presented performance metrics. Next, the actual feasibility of the proposed system is verified via proof-of-concept experiments on a RIS-assisted PLA prototype platform. The experiment results show that there are 3.5% and 76% performance improvements when the transmission sources are at different locations and at the same location, respectively.