Hash Function and Lightweight Encryption Aided Authentication Design for Radio Frequency Watermarking Systems

Radio frequency watermarking systems embed the secret watermark bits into host bits for secure transmissions. However, malicious users may initiate falsifying attacks via broadcasting wireless channels. Meanwhile, the interferences of watermark signals to host signals will degrade the bit error rate (BER) performances. With the aim to enhance both the security and the reliability performances, we propose to utilize the Hash function to generate the unique digital digest of host signals for the integrity check. Then the lightweight encryption and spreading are conducted to compose the watermark signals. At the receiver, reverse operations are performed to recover both host signals and watermark signals. Then the retrieved digest is used to check the integrity and validity of host signals to combat falsifying attacks. Subsequently, we derive the bit error rate (BER) and the information leakage expressions. Simulation results are then provided to validate the proposed design.