Physical Layer Authentication with Cascade Channel Characteristics in IRS-Assisted UAV Communication System

This paper develops a physical layer authentication (PLA) scheme based on the channel characteristics of cascade channels in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) communication systems augmented by intelligent reflective surface (IRS) to counteract identity spoofing attacks. Particularly, we model the cascade communication channel of the IRS-assisted UAV communication systems as an equivalent point-to-point Nakagami fading channel and formulate the PLA problem as a binary hypothesis test. We use the energy measurement of the received signal as a test statistic and derive its probability density function (PDF), conducted to validate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.