Beam squint effect: a friend or a foe in physical layer authentication for RIS-assisted systems?

Bendaimi, Amira, Abdallah, Asmaa, Celik, Abdulkadir, Eltawil, Ahmed M. and Arslan, Hüseyin (2025) Beam squint effect: a friend or a foe in physical layer authentication for RIS-assisted systems? In 2024 IEEE Globecom Workshops (GC Wkshps). IEEE. 6 pp . (doi:10.1109/gcwkshp64532.2024.11100333).

Abstract

Authentication remains a paramount issue in wide-band Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS)-assisted systems, as their broadcast nature renders them susceptible to eavesdropping and spoofing attacks. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a location-based approach for physical layer authentication (PLA) in a wideband RIS-aided multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, thereby addressing a critical gap in the literature. This approach leverages the beam squint effect in wideband systems, a phenomenon that has typically been overlooked in prior narrowband studies. Furthermore, our study thoroughly investigates the ramifications of the beam squint effects on PLA in RIS-assisted systems, evaluating whether it boosts or impedes authentication performance. The key idea behind the proposed frequency-dependent PLA scheme is to exploit the unique sparse nature of the beamspace cascaded channel. By incorporating the beam squint effect, our approach enhances authentication performance through the extraction of squinted virtual angle indices, which are then used to construct a robust authentication signature designed to thwart spoofing attacks. The analysis of the proposed authentication signature distribution yields analytical expressions for the false alarm and detection probabilities of the scheme. Simulation results substantiate the efficacy of our approach, demonstrating a 31.5% improvement in detection and false alarm rates, even under low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions, affirming the robustness and effectiveness of our proposed scheme.

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Contributors

Author: Abdulkadir Celik

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