Physical Layer Authentication in the Internet of Vehicles based on Signal Propagation Attribute Prediction

Abstract

Physical layer authentication (PLA) has emerged as a promising alternative to complex cryptographic-based authentication schemes, especially for the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) scenarios with resource-limited onboard units (OBUs). However, the existing PLA schemes securing the IoV against GPS location spoofing/falsification attacks consider only insider attackers. Moreover, they cannot be used by mobile vehicles to validate GPS locations. To address these issues, this paper proposes a PLA scheme based on the Gaussian process (GP) path loss prediction, where channel state information (CSI) is used to track the variation of the channel characteristics and predict the next legitimate path loss (PL) of the signal from a transmitter for authentication. The key ideas in the proposed scheme are to first establish a mapping between the historical CSI attributes and PL features of the transmitter’s signal and use this mapping to predict the next PL, which is then used to cross-verify the transmitter’s reported location information. Extensive simulation experiments are conducted using generated radio channel characteristics from the quasideterministic radio channel generator (QuaDRiGa) to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The results of the experiments show that our system efficiently addressed the limitations of the existing works and improves the authentication performance in IoV environments.