Physical Layer Authentication Based on CFO and Visibility Graph

Wireless networks are more vulnerable to attacks such as eavesdropping and intercepting than traditional wireline networks because of the inherent broadcast feature of the wireless medium. Nowadays, security is becoming more and more important with the rapid pace of innovation of wireless communication technologies such as 5G. Exploiting the unique characteristics of the physical layer of wireless networks to perform device authentication and enhance wireless security appears promising recently. In this paper, we investigate the carrier frequency offset (CFO) caused by the imperfection of the transceiver parts and further implement device authentication by extracting and analyzing the visibility graph (VG) features of CFO series. Firstly, with the fine estimation of CFO for each frame, a time series of CFO can be formed. VG is then extracted and the degree distributions are used for features extracting and matching. Finally, a security authentication scheme of combined CFO values and the features derived from the VG of CFO series is proposed. Experimental results and analyses show that our proposed scheme can successfully achieve device authentication with tolerable computational overhead.