Impact of Residual Hardware Impairments on RIS-Aided Authentication

In next-generation communication systems, physical layer security is a key research area with the aim of enhancing authentication mechanisms and providing standalone or complementary support to conventional cryptographic techniques. Since some physical features such as wireless channels and/or hardware impairments of each user equipment are often unique, these can be leveraged in novel authentication methods and models. This study investigates the impact of residual hardware impairments (RHI) on reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided communication networks in the presence of spoofing attacks. We find that increasing the number of metasurface elements and the signal-to-noise ratio enhances detection performance with the support of RIS. Furthermore, the integration of RIS significantly improves miss detection and false alarm rate performance thanks to providing richness of channels. We also compare the role of phase-shift matrices in detecting spoofing attacks. Our results show that a higher RHI for Eve facilitates the detection of spoofing attacks with the help of RIS.