A Secure and Private Authentication Based on Radio Frequency Fingerprinting
Chengchen Zhu, Kunling Li, Jianan Hong, Cunqing Hua, Futai Zou · 2024
The technology development of wireless communication has brought about the rapid growth of various wireless devices, but also brings in many security threats. This paper focuses on the security and privacy problems in wireless authentication and proposes a novel authentication scheme based on the design of reusable fuzzy extractor (RFE) for device's radio frequency (RF) fingerprinting. Firstly, unlike the traditional authentication protocol, our scheme can accomplish the mutual authentication without the storage of long-term secret key, thus tackles with the key-compromise threats. Furthermore, although the scheme authenticates devices based on their RF fingerprint, it does not store RF fingerprinting information explicitly to safeguard it from eavesdroppers who may use it to impersonate the identity of valid users. Finally, our designed protocol relies on the correspondent peer to measure the fingerprint, rather than the device itself, thus is more secure against various adversaries. The security analysis shows the resiliency against theft of secret keys, wireless channel attacks and privacy disclosure. And the performance evaluation demonstrates that the design of RFE for device's RF fingernrinting is efficient in terms of recognition accuracy.