Privacy-Preserving Physical Layer Authentication Exploiting Carrier Frequency Offset in UAV-aided Communication Systems

This paper proposes a privacy-preserving physical layer (PHY-layer) authentication scheme based on carrier frequency offset (CFO) to combat impersonation and eavesdropping attacks initiated by illegitimate unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in UAV-aided communication system. First, we employ the MOOSE method to extract hardware fingerprints from the received signals. Second, encryption and decryption scheme is generated based on the extracted fingerprints to improve the privacy-preserving performance. Then, we construct the PHY-layer authentication problem into a binary hypothesis test and derive analytical expressions for detection probability theoretically. Finally, the authentication performance and privacy protection effectiveness of the proposed scheme are validated through extensive simulation experiments, confirming the correctness of the established theoretical model.