Unconditional Authentication Based on Physical Layer Offered Chain Key in Wireless Communication

Authentication is a critical issue in wireless communication due to the impersonation and substitution attacks from the vulnerable air interface launched by the malicious node. There are currently two kinds of authentication research in wireless communication. One is based on cryptography and relies on computational complexity, the other is based on physical layer fingerprint and can not protect data integrity well. Both of these approaches will become insecure when facing attackers with infinite computing power. In this paper, we develop a wireless unconditional authentication framework based on one-time keys generated from wireless channel. The proposed unconditional authentication framework provides a new perspective to resist infinite computing power attackers. We study the performance of the unconditional authentication framework in this paper. First, a physical layer offered chain key (PHYLOCK) structure is proposed, which can provide one-time keys for unconditional authentication. The physical layer offered chain keys are generated by XORing the physical layer updated keys extracted from the current channel state information (CSI) and the previous chain keys. The security of PHYLOCK is analyzed from the perspective of information theory. Then, the boundary of the deception probability is conducted. It is shown that unconditional authentication can achieve a probability of deception 2−12Hk, where Hk is the entropy of the one-time key used for one message. Finally, the conditions for unconditional authentication are listed. Our analysis shows that the length of the key and the authentication code need to be twice the length of the message and the encoding rules of the authentication code need to satisfy the restrictions we listed.