Artificial Noise-Aided MIMO Physical Layer Authentication With Imperfect CSI

Fingerprint embedding at the physical layer is a highly tunable authentication framework for wireless communication that achieves information-theoretic security by hiding a traditional HMAC tag in noise. In a multiantenna scenario, artificial noise (AN) can be transmitted to obscure the tag even further. The AN strategy, however, relies on perfect knowledge of the channel state information (CSI) between the legitimate users. When the CSI is not perfectly known, the added noise leaks into the receiver’s observations. In this article, we explore whether AN still improves security in the fingerprint embedding authentication framework with only imperfect CSI available at the transmitter and receiver. Specifically, we discuss and design detectors that account for AN leakage and analyze the adversary’s ability to recover the key from observed transmissions. We compare the detection and security performance of the optimal perfect CSI detector with the imperfect CSI robust matched filter test and a generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT). We find that utilizing AN can greatly improve security, but suffers from diminishing returns when the quality of CSI knowledge is poor. In fact, we find that in some cases allocating additional power to AN can begin to decrease key security.