Tag-based Physical-Layer Authentication Against Message Interference

Abstract

Tag-based Physical-Layer Authentication (PLA) has attracted significant attention in recent years due to its low complexity, high security, and low latency. Traditional tag-based PLA schemes typically estimate tags by decoding the message and then subtracting the estimation of the message from the received signal. However, these approaches suffer from two main limitations. First, decoding errors introduce message interference that degrades authentication performance. Second, the analytical complexity of decoding errors leads to sub-optimal threshold settings, thereby limiting detection probability. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a Tag-Based Challenge-Response (TBCR) scheme and a Series Cancellation Authentication (SCA) scheme. Specifically, in the TBCR scheme, the tags are superimposed on a forwarded challenge signal, enabling the receiver to estimate tags by removing the known challenge signal rather than relying on decoding. However, the challenge-response mechanism introduces extra noise. Here, we propose the SCA scheme without the noise interference, where both the series signal generation and cancellation modules are well-designed to generate authentication signals and estimate tags, respectively. Furthermore, we derive the closed-form expressions to evaluate the robustness and security of both proposed schemes. Notably, on one hand, the optimal threshold and detection probability are derived, which theoretically reveal that the SCA scheme always achieves the ideal detection performance, while the TBCR scheme does so in the absence of noise at Alice. On the other hand, the TBCR scheme provides enhanced security at high Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) regions with fewer keys. Theoretical analysis and simulation demonstrate that both proposed schemes significantly outperform the benchmarks in detection probability with reduced time complexity.