Physical-Layer Authentication in the Presence of Cooperative Adversarial Attacks

This paper tackles a notable security loophole in tag-based Physical-Layer Authentication (PLA) when faced with cooperative attacks, highlighting its significance due to two main reasons. First, while attackers may only observe the tag amid noise, they can reduce the noise effect through multiple observations. Furthermore, several cooperative attackers can orchestrate more sophisticated attacks, achieving goals beyond the reach of a single attacker. In this paper, we propose an enhanced PLA scheme, designated as the Enhanced Detection of Cooperative Attacks (EDCA) scheme, to counter these cooperative threats. The basic idea of the EDCA scheme involves utilizing a unique noise characteristic induced by replayed signals to identify and thwart cooperative attacks, preventing attackers from accumulating multiple observations of the same tag. We theoretically analyze the proposed scheme over fading channels and derive closed-form expressions for its performance. Implementation and rigorous evaluation of the EDCA scheme are carried out to compare its performance with prior schemes. Simulation results confirm the alignment of theoretical predictions with empirical outcomes. The proposed scheme not only can effectively detect cooperative attacks but also provide a better detection performance.