Secure authentication in MIMO systems: exploring physical limits

Abstract

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology is employed to improve the reliability and capacity of wireless communication systems. However, the wireless communication environment creates vulnerabilities to spoofing attacks. Furthermore, the authentication challenges posed by the heterogeneous characteristics of wireless applications increase as diverse technologies facilitate the growing number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. To address these challenges, adaptive physical-layer authentication (PLA) leveraging the inherent antenna diversity in MIMO systems is examined, and an information-theoretic perspective on PLA in MIMO systems is given. The real and imaginary components of the received reference signals are used as attributes with a single-class classification support vector machine (SCC-SVM). It is shown that the authentication performance improves with the number of antennas, and the proposed scheme provides robust authentication.