Physical Layer Challenge-Response Authentication Between Ambient Backscatter Devices

Ambient backscatter communication (AmBC) has become an integral part of ubiquitous Internet of Things (IoT) applications due to its energy-harvesting capabilities and ultra-low- power consumption. However, the open wireless environment exposes AmBC systems to various attacks, and existing authentication methods cannot be implemented between resource-constrained backscatter devices (BDs) due to their high computational demands. To this end, this paper proposes PLCRA-BD, a novel physical layer challenge-response authentication scheme between BDs in AmBC that overcomes BDs’ limitations, supports high mobility, and performs robustly against impersonation and wireless attacks. It constructs embedded keys as physical layer fingerprints for lightweight identification and designs a joint transceiver that integrates BDs’ backscatter waveform with receiver functionality to mitigate interference from ambient RF signals by exploiting repeated patterns in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) symbols. Based on this, a challenge-response authentication procedure is introduced to enable low-complexity fingerprint exchange between two paired BDs leveraging channel coherence, while securing the exchange process using a random number and unpredictable channel fading. Additionally, we optimize the authentication procedure for high-mobility scenarios, completing exchanges within the channel coherence time to minimize the impact of dynamic channel fluctuations. Security analysis confirms its resistance against impersonation, eavesdropping, replay, and counterfeiting attacks. Extensive simulations validate its effectiveness in resource-constrained BDs, demonstrating high authentication accuracy across diverse channel conditions, robustness against multiple wireless attacks, and superior efficiency compared to traditional authentication schemes.