Physical-layer authentication Using chaotic maps

Abstract

Message authentication, which ensures that a received message comes from its acclaimed sender, is of fundamental importance for secure communication systems. We consider in this work a physical layer authentication system employing tag signals embedded in the message to provide a robust authentication method. This work diverges from previous work in the area when it comes to the tag generation method. While the previous works use methods based on cryptographic hash functions or on the channel side information our system employs unidimensional chaotic maps to generate these tags. Due to the loss of information about the initial condition of chaotic maps, we show that they are strong candidates for the tag generation process. We prove that chaotic tags provide a positive lower bound on the unconditional security of the system. Additionally, we calculate the probability of success for three possible attacks to the authentication system: impersonation, substitution and replay.Finally, we analyze how the system parameters affect these probabilities and some performance metrics (bit error rate, outage probability, probability of false negative) and explore the tradeoff between security and performance in order to provide guidelines to design the system.