Conventional authentication mechanisms routinely used for validating communication devices are facing significant challenges. This is mainly due to their reliance on both ‘spoofable’ digital credentials and static binary characteristic, and inevitable misdetection in physical layer authentication using time-varying attributes, leading to the cascading risks of security and trust. To circumvent these impediments, we develop an adaptive trust management based soft authentication and progressive authorization scheme by intelligently exploiting the time-varying communication link-related attribute of the transmitter to improve wireless security. First of all, the trust relationship between the transmitter and receiver is established based on the evaluation of selected physical layer attribute for fast authentication and multiple-level authorization. Through the designed trust model, the transmitter is authorized by the specific level of services/resources corresponding to its trust level, so that soft security is achieved. To dynamically update the trust level of the transmitter, we propose an online conformal prediction-based adaptive trust adjustment algorithm relying on the real-time validation of its attribute estimates at the receiver, thus resulting in progressive authorization. The performance of our scheme is theoretically analyzed in terms of its individual risk and individual satisfaction. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly improves the security performance and robustness in time-varying environments, and performs better than the static binary authentication scheme and existing physical layer authentication benchmarker.

中文翻译：

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基于物理层属性的软认证和渐进式授权的自适应信任管理

通常用于验证通信设备的传统认证机制正面临重大挑战。这主要是由于它们依赖于“可欺骗”的数字凭证和静态二进制特征，并且在使用时变属性的物理层身份验证中不可避免地会出现错误检测，从而导致安全和信任的级联风险。为了规避这些障碍，我们开发了一种基于自适应信任管理的软认证和渐进式授权方案，通过智能地利用发射机的时变通信链路相关属性来提高无线安全性。首先，基于对所选物理层属性的评估，建立发送方和接收方之间的信任关系，以实现快速认证和多级授权。通过设计的信任模型，发送方获得与其信任级别对应的特定服务/资源级别的授权，从而实现软安全。为了动态更新发送器的信任级别，我们提出了一种基于在线保形预测的自适应信任调整算法，该算法依赖于接收器对其属性估计的实时验证，从而导致渐进式授权。我们的方案的性能从其个人风险和个人满意度方面进行了理论上的分析。我们的仿真结果表明，所提出的方案显着提高了时变环境下的安全性能和鲁棒性，并且比静态二进制认证方案和现有的物理层认证基准器性能更好。