Energy-Based Optimization of Physical-Layer Challenge-Response Authentication with Drones

TL;DR

This paper introduces an energy-efficient physical-layer challenge-response authentication protocol for drones, leveraging wireless channel characteristics and movement-based verification to enhance security.

Contribution

It proposes a novel drone authentication method using channel statistics and movement, with three energy-aware solutions including greedy, optimal, and heuristic approaches.

Findings

The proposed protocol effectively authenticates drones in simulations.

Energy-aware solutions improve authentication efficiency.

The heuristic method offers a good balance between complexity and performance.

Abstract

Drones are expected to be used for many tasks in the future and require secure communication protocols. In this work, we propose a novel physical layer authentication (PLA)-based challenge-response (CR) protocol in which a drone Bob authenticates the sender (either on the ground or air) by exploiting his prior knowledge of the wireless channel statistic (fading, path loss, and shadowing). In particular, Bob will move to a set of positions in the space, and by estimating the attenuations of the received signals he will authenticate the sender. We take into account the energy consumption in the design and provide three solutions: a purely greedy solution (PG), an optimal Bellman iterative solution (BI), and a heuristic solution based on the evaluation of the standard deviation of the attenuations in the space. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through numerical simulations.