PUF-based Authentication Protocol with Physical Layer-based Obfuscated Challenge-Response Pair

Node authentication is essential in IoT systems where interconnected resource-constrained devices operate autonomously. Developing a lightweight authentication technique is requisite to prevent malicious nodes from joining the network and impersonating legitimate nodes. This paper develops a novel protocol to enable mutual authentication for node pairs. The protocol combines the advantage of hardware-based security primitives, namely physically unclonable functions (PUFs), and agility and configurability of physical-layer communication mechanisms, specifically the Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) method. Distinct from existing PUF-based techniques, our protocol allows two devices to mutually authenticate each other without the involvement of an intermediary server. Moreover, the proposed protocol encodes the transmitted information to protect it from any possible eavesdropping attempts that aim to model the PUF of a legitimate node. The experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed protocol against modeling attacks and impersonation attempts.