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IEEE Transactions on Information Theory

On the Basic Limits of RF-Fingerprint-Based Authentication

Onur Güngör, C. Emre Koksal

Published May 25, 2016• 39 citations
Publisher

Abstract

RF fingerprinting exploits the variations in the RF chain of radios to uniquely identify transmitters, and distinguish adversarial transmissions from the transmissions of legitimate nodes. We provide a systematic approach rooted from the information theory to evaluate the basic performance limits of RF fingerprinting. We develop a novel channel model for RF fingerprinting, where the imperfections in the RF chain are modeled as a fingerprint channel, cascaded to the actual physical channel. We address the authentication problem in the presence of an adversary, where both the legitimate transmitter and the adversary are equipped with unique fingerprint channels, in addition to a possible secret key available at the legitimate nodes. We provide bounds for the error exponents for reliable communication of the legitimate nodes, and the success exponent for impersonation and substitution attacks of the adversary, as a function of certain parameters based on their RF-fingerprints, and the shared key rate. We illustrate that keyless authentication is possible via RF fingerprints when the legitimate channel is not simulatable. We also show that the probability of these attacks can be reduced significantly by employing additional dedicated authenticated nodes.

DOI
10.1109/tit.2016.2572725

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RF fingerprinting exploits the variations in the RF chain of radios to uniquely identify transmitters, and distinguish adversarial transmissions from the transmissions of legitimate nodes. We provide a systematic approach rooted from the information theory to evaluate the basic performance limits of RF fingerprinting. We develop a novel channel model for RF fingerprinting, where the imperfections in the RF chain are modeled as a fingerprint channel, cascaded to the actual physical channel. We address the authentication problem in the presence of an adversary, where both the legitimate transmitter and the adversary are equipped with unique fingerprint channels, in addition to a possible secret key available at the legitimate nodes. We provide bounds for the error exponents for reliable communication of the legitimate nodes, and the success exponent for impersonation and substitution attacks of the adversary, as a function of certain parameters based on their RF-fingerprints, and the shared key rate. We illustrate that keyless authentication is possible via RF fingerprints when the legitimate channel is not simulatable. We also show that the probability of these attacks can be reduced significantly by employing additional dedicated authenticated nodes.
RF fingerprinting exploits the variations in the RF chain of radios to uniquely identify transmitters, and distinguish adversarial transmissions from transmissions of legitimate nodes. We provide a systematic approach rooted from information theory to evaluate basic performance limits of RF fingerprinting. We develop a novel channel model for RF fingerprinting, where the imperfections in the RF chain are modeled as a fingerprint channel, cascaded to the actual physical channel. We address the authentication problem in the presence of an adversary, where both the legitimate transmitter and the adversary are equipped with unique fingerprint channels, in addition to a possible secret key available at the legitimate nodes. We provide achievable bounds for the error exponents for reliable communication of the legitimate nodes, and the success exponent for impersonation and substitution attacks of the adversary, as a function of certain parameters based on their RF-fingerprints, and the shared key rate. We illustrate that keyless authentication is possible via RF fingerprints when the legitimate channel is not simulatable.
RF fingerprinting exploits the variations in the RF chain of radios to uniquely identify transmitters, and distinguish adversarial transmissions from legitimate nodes. We provide a systematic approach rooted from information theory to understand basic performance limits of RF fingerprinting. We develop a novel channel model to cover RF fingerprinting systems, where the imperfections in the RF chain are modeled as a fingerprint channel, cascaded to the physical channel. We analyze authentication problem in the presence of an adversary, where both the legitimate transmitter and the adversary are equipped with unique fingerprint channels. We provide bounds for the error exponents of the legitimate nodes, and the success exponent of the adversary, as a function of their fingerprints. We illustrate that concepts analogous to Maurer's simulatability are necessary to guarantee authentication via RF fingerprints.
We consider the problem of keyless message authentication over noisy channels in the presence of an active adversary. Different from the existing models, in our model, the legitimate users do not have any pre-shared key for authentication. Instead, we use the noisy channel connecting the legitimate users for authentication. The main idea is to utilize the noisy channel connecting the legitimate users to distinguish a legitimate message from a fake message, by generating an output at the receiver that is difficult for the adversary to replicate through its noisy channel. By interpreting the message authentication as a hypothesis testing problem, we investigate the authentication exponent and the authenticated channel capacity of the noisy channel. In the authentication exponent problem, for a given message rate, we investigate the speed at which the optimal successful attack probability can be driven to zero. We fully characterize the authentication exponent for the zero-rate message case and provide both an upper bound and a lower bound on the exponent for the non-zero message rate case. In the authenticated capacity problem, we study the largest data transmission rate under which the attacker's optimal successful attack probability can still be made arbitrarily small. We establish an all or nothing result. In particular, we show that the authenticated channel capacity is the same as the classic channel capacity if a simulatability condition is not satisfied, while the authenticated capacity will be zero if this condition is satisfied. We also provide efficient algorithms to check this condition. We further show that our results are robust to modeling uncertainties about the eavesdropper's channels.
Keyless authentication is considered in an adversarial point-to-point channel. Namely, a legitimate transmitter and receiver aim to communicate over a noisy channel that may or may not also contain an active adversary, capable of transmitting an arbitrary signal into the channel. If the adversary is not present, then the receiver must successfully decode the message with high probability; if it is present, then the receiver must either decode the message or detect the adversary's presence. Thus, whenever the receiver decodes, it can be certain that the decoded message is authentic. The exact authentication capacity is characterized for discrete-memoryless adversary channels, where the adversary is assumed to know the code but not the message. The authentication capacity is shown to be either zero or equal to the no-adversary capacity, depending on whether the channel satisfies a condition termed overwritability.
This work establishes that the physical layer can be used to perform information-theoretic authentication in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels, as long as the adversary is not omniscient. The model considered consists of an encoder, decoder, and adversary, where the adversary knows the message given to the encoder, has a non-causal noisy observation of the encoder’s transmission and may use unlimited transmission power, while the decoder observes a noisy version of the sum of the encoder and adversary’s outputs. A method to modify a generic existing channel code to enable authentication is presented. This method relies on injecting message-dependent noise into the transmission and accepting the transmission as authentic only if the correct noise levels for the decoded message are observed. One drawback to this method is that the encoder must still transmit a low-power signal in the case where there is no message to send. It is shown that this modification costs an asymptotically negligible amount of the coding rate, while still enabling authentication as long as the adversary’s observation is not noiseless. Also notable is that this modification is not (asymptotically) a function of the statistical characterization of the adversary’s channel and no secret key is required. We believe these features will pave the way for a robust practical implementation. Using these results, the channel-authenticated capacity is calculated and shown to be equal to the non-adversarial channel capacity. As our results will show, information-theoretic authentication in AWGN channels is possible without the need for the legitimate party to have a model-based advantage over the adversary. While this modular scheme is designed for use in the given channel model, it is applicable to a wide range of settings.
User authentication (UA) supports the receiver in deciding whether a message comes from either the claimed transmitter or an impersonating attacker. Information-theoretically secure authentication can be implemented by using either a secret (symmetric key) shared between both the legitimate users or the transmission medium over which the message is transmitted [physical-layer authentication (PLA)]. We analyze these solutions when the physical-layer channel is the unique randomness source for either generating the key or performing PLA. For the symmetric-key-based UA approach, we resort to a secret key agreement. Moreover, we also consider an asymmetric-key-based UA based on the public-key (proven to be semantically secure), where the channel is used as an entropy source at one device only. We define the secure authentication rate at which the probability that the UA attack succeeds goes to zero as the number of independent and identically distributed variables describing how the channel goes to infinity. Both passive and active attacks are considered, and by numerical results, we compare the various UA schemes.