Channel-based spoofing detection in frequency-selective Rayleigh channels

The radio channel response decorrelates rapidly as the transmitter changes location in an environment with rich scatterers and reflectors. Based on this fact, a channel-based authentication scheme was previously proposed to discriminate between transmitters at different locations, and thus to detect spoofing attacks in wireless networks. In this paper, we study its application in frequency-selective Rayleigh channels, considering channel time variations due to environmental changes and terminal mobility, as well as the channel estimation errors due to the interference from other radios. We propose a generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) that is optimal but computationally cumbersome, and a simplified version that requires no a priori knowledge of channel parameters and is therefore more practical. We verify the efficacy of the channel-based spoofing detectors via numerical analysis, showing how performance is improved by using multiple antennas, higher transmit power, and wider system bandwidth. We show that, under a wide variety of practical conditions, spoofing can be detected with better than 90% probability while keeping the probability of falsely rejecting valid transmissions below 10%.