PLAP-PCPE: Physical-layer authentication protocol based on PUF and channel pre-equalization for the Internet of Things

How to ensure the security of device access is a common concern in the Internet of Things (IoT) scenario with extremely high device connection density. To achieve efficient and secure network access for IoT devices with constrained resources, this paper proposes a lightweight physical-layer authentication protocol based on Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) and channel pre-equalization. PUF is employed as a secret carrier to provide authentication credentials for devices due to its hardware-based uniqueness and unclonable property. Meanwhile, the short-term reciprocity and spatio-temporal uniqueness of wireless channels are utilized to attach an authentication factor related to the spatio-temporal position of devices and to secure the transmission of authentication messages. The proposed protocol is analyzed formally and informally to prove its correctness and security against typical attacks. Simulation results show its robustness in various radio environments. Moreover, we illustrate the advantages of our protocol in terms of security features and complexity through performance comparison with existing authentication schemes.