Physical Layer Authentication Exploiting Multipath Delay Fingerprints in Millimeter-Wave Communication Systems

To effectively address the issue of identity spoofing attacks in millimeter-wave (mmWave) systems, this paper proposes a physical layer authentication (PLA) mechanism that leverages multipath delay fingerprint features to enhance the system’s resilience to impersonation. A detailed mmWave channel model is constructed, and a precise method for estimating and extracting multipath delay features is developed. The device authentication task is formulated as a binary hypothesis testing problem, for which closed-form expressions for the probability of false alarm and the probability of detection are derived, providing a theoretical guarantee for the performance of the proposed scheme. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism can effectively mitigate the threat of identity spoofing in mmWave communication environments.