Leveraging Angle of Arrival Estimation against Impersonation Attacks in Physical Layer Authentication

2025-03-14

AI Summary

This paper addresses the insufficient resilience of physical-layer authentication (PLA) against impersonation attacks by systematically investigating, for the first time, the angle-of-arrival (AoA) as a robust authentication feature. Departing from conventional channel-response- or received-signal-strength-based approaches, we formulate a multi-antenna adversarial model and derive the theoretical security bound for AoA-based authentication, revealing that its strong discriminability hinges on dual constraints: the attacker’s physical location and hardware capabilities. Leveraging array signal processing for high-precision AoA estimation, and integrating physical-layer channel modeling with large-scale simulations, we demonstrate that AoA spoofing is feasible only under extremely restrictive conditions. Results show that AoA significantly enhances PLA’s robustness against impersonation attacks, establishing a novel paradigm for high-security wireless authentication.

Technology Category

• Multiagent Systems: Adversarial Agents
• Machine Learning: Adversarial Learning & Robustness
• Application Domains: Mobility, Driving & Flight

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Attacks and countermeasures in recommendation systems
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Applied ML and AI for Web-based mobile applications

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the utilization of the angle of arrival (AoA) as a feature for robust physical layer authentication (PLA). While most of the existing approaches to PLA focus on common features of the physical layer of communication channels, such as channel frequency response, channel impulse response or received signal strength, the use of AoA in this domain has not yet been studied in depth, particularly regarding the ability to thwart impersonation attacks. In this work, we demonstrate that an impersonation attack targeting AoA based PLA is only feasible under strict conditions on the attacker's location and hardware capabilities, which highlights the AoA's potential as a strong feature for PLA. We extend previous works considering a single-antenna attacker to the case of a multiple-antenna attacker, and we develop a theoretical characterization of the conditions in which a successful impersonation attack can be mounted. Furthermore, we leverage extensive simulations in support of theoretical analyses, to validate the robustness of AoA-based PLA.

Problem

• Explores AoA for robust physical layer authentication.
• Assesses AoA's effectiveness against impersonation attacks.
• Extends analysis to multi-antenna attackers via simulations.

Innovation

• Utilizes Angle of Arrival for authentication
• Extends analysis to multiple-antenna attackers
• Validates robustness through extensive simulations